V-Rally 4

V-Rally 4 stays on the safe side in the rally sub-genre. The result is a game that feels a bit too familiar, though it does come with some impressive rally tests. It's too bad the cars are too unpredictable.

Fans of the series will feel at home with the handling model, which recaptures the feel and behaviour of the original in a new modern context with surprising success. It's not a sim-heavy experience, but it is an appropriate challenge that asks more of the player than the average arcade rally affair does. The car list is lacking in terms of modern options, but existing fans will have a soft spot for the classics on offer. It's just a shame that the career mode fails to distinguish itself, and the online multiplayer is sparsely populated. Any future iterations will need to be more inventive, but V-Rally 4 is a surprisingly fun throwback.

Track design, off-road arcade driving and nice scenarios make V-Rally 4 a game worth trying; unfortunately, asphalt races, career and Buggy/Rally Cross are much less enjoyable.

V-Rally 4 is a very technical and difficult racing simulator: it will make many fans happy, despite some problems.

V-Rally 4 transforms the franchise experience into something globally pleasant, gameplaywise, but is way too light on content and environnements. Plus, the AI is catastrophic.

At last a new V-Rally game is a reality. Maybe V-Rally 4 is not the definitive rally experience that some players would have dream for but, in the other hand, it's a fine tuning rally experience suitable for a great number of users.

V-Rally is back with a quite simplistic arcade racing game, with a fair amount of content, but also with a very basic gameplay. It does a split-screen multiplayer, which can be great for some players.

The rally fundamentals are there, but so is a disappointingly shoddy career mode. Genre fans will find a lot to love, but this is far from taking pole position. [Issue#155, p.86]

No thrills is quite a good description when speaking about V-Rally 4 overall. There is nothing exceptional or bad with the game, it’s just okay, a racing game that can be enjoyable, but has some irksome design choices and a lack of polish. It’s more surprising that the name returned in 2018, but it’s an uninspired sequel with an sterile career mode. At least the tracks featured are good, its visuals are decent enough – at times can set some lovely landscape shots – and the handling, once become accustom to it, is enough to bring some arcade racing fun to the table, if only the song selection was much better, because I am still having nightmares about “the weight of the world”.

The 4th installment in V-Rally series is not the sequel that can take the series forward. In total, there is not a specific mechanic that can be considered as a weakness, but the problem is that there is neither notable improvements nor exciting new features to help the series gain a position among top quality racing titles.

V-Rally 4 offers a classic rally experience that has its origins in the early 00s. However, the career mode isn't well designed and Kylotonn made a wrong decision by choosing to include many types of racing categories instead of focusing solely on perfecting rallying.

Once you get to grips with how it handles, V-Rally 4 is a competent and lightweight arcade-style off-road racer with a fair bit of charm that harkens back to the series’ foundations. Aiming for spectacle and variety in design, it looks and feels like a 2018 V-Rally game. However, a shallow and disappointing career mode, irritating music, and a handful of visual and gameplay bugs means you’re likely to grow weary in a short space of time.

V-Rally 4 has some good ideas and a solid base, but it seems that we are always close to something excellent, before being disappointed by a disruptive element, as it will probably remain limited to racing enthusiasts.

An arcade racing game with some spectacular moments, whose roots are guiltily stuck in the past.

V-Rally 4 does not manage to be the return that we expected from the franchise. Kylotonn shows what he’s capable with Rally, but the rest doesn’t reach the same quality.

Ultimately, V-Rally 4 is a solid if comprehensively unremarkable rally racing game. It offers neither the simulation depth of Dirt Rally nor the arcade racing hijinks of Dirt, straddling the line somewhere between the two. It can be moderately entertaining despite its dry personality, but up against stiff competition, it’s an all too forgettable entry. Perhaps V-Rally was best left in its nostalgia-fuelled haze.

Every single aspect of production seems a clear step backwards from the development team's past.

V-Rally 4 is worst than the previous game developed by Kylotonn Studios. It mixes every competition inside the career mode, creating a lot of confusion in the player's mind. The graphics are outdated and driving system is inaccurate.

While visually very appealing and with a highly varied career mode, V-Rally 4 is plagued by a poor control scheme which can't decide whether it wants to be an arcade racer or a race simulator. Paired with very long load times the end result is a game which could and should have been far better than the end result. V-Rally deserves better.

An unlikely sequel that ultimately struggles to find its place among today’s line-up of more polished and more established alternatives.

V-Rally 4's biggest problem is a lack of identity. You're given plenty of disciplines to try but a narrow set of locales wear thin quickly. Whilst these areas do look nice and there's a decent array of vehicles, their handling feels suspiciously off. It all combines to be a frustrating effort. You'll get some enjoyment tackling human opponents but I'm not sure how long it'll last.

It’s never that V-Rally 4 is actively bad, but the 16-year wait since V-Rally 3 is no way near worth it.

Lacking the precision required to tantalize the more serious racing fan, but perhaps too much of a challenge for many, V-Rally 4 is packed to the brim with nice ideas and potential, but just as many annoyances. Sadly, in this competitive marketplace, it is stuck in a ditch. The strange layout of the career mode and iffy handling model do their very best to put a downer on things, but I really hope Kylotonn has the resources to build upon this effort and provide something that can take the fight to the very best racing games in the future.

While Kylotonns rally games showed positive tendencies with the WRC series, this is a serious setback. This is a disappointing comeback for the franchise.

In a genre that has its fair share of challengers, V Rally 4 comes in dead last thanks to its bipolar handling, meagre selection of tracks and a modest grab bag of disciplines that fails to excite any fan of dirty racing.