Every now and then you get a free game through Games With Gold that does little more than make you glad you got to play it for free rather than having wasted your money. I can honestly say that if I had paid any amount of money for this game, however small, I would have been bitterly disappointed.
Trading off a well known racing series name I had fairly high hopes for VR4. I expected itEvery now and then you get a free game through Games With Gold that does little more than make you glad you got to play it for free rather than having wasted your money. I can honestly say that if I had paid any amount of money for this game, however small, I would have been bitterly disappointed.
Trading off a well known racing series name I had fairly high hopes for VR4. I expected it to be a competitor for Dirt but perhaps slightly more accessible and arcade like. Unfortunately VR4 has no idea what it actually wants to be. It has its AI even at default level be exceptionally challenging to compete with. Its courses are winding and littered with dead drops off the side of the track or boulders that will send you flipping side over side as you accidentally drift into them going around a corner. However this is all irrelevant because the controls are so incredibly bad the game becomes close to unplayable. I haven't played a racing game with such poor controls in a very, very long time. All of the cars feel floaty and unresponsive to input. In a rally game the steering needs to have a particular feel so you can navigate so many corners in quick succession but this fails at that utterly. You never seem to have complete control over the car and by the time you've got the car doing what you want it to you're already in the next corner and likely crashing.
The tracks look quite good at a glance in the pre-race cutscenes but once you're racing you're too busy frantically trying to stop your car oversteer and then understeer in consecutive corners to really focus on the graphics of anything other than your car. Which leads me to my next criticism the car models are shockingly bad. This game was only released just under 2 years ago and the models are dated and for lack of a better term, squished down. Every car looks too compact, like a micro machine model and the noise is just a constant high whining rev that barely differs from car to car.
The issues with the graphics don't just stop at the vehicle models. For that extra arcade look they have added a ton of bloom lighting effects to every course which makes it all but impossible to actually see what is coming ahead of you which is, as you'd imagine, pretty important in a rally game. It makes some of the stages an excercise in frustration in particular the Tokyo street rally where they're expecting you to race through tight back alleys full of right angle turns when you can't see a thing because of the sunlight bloom effect washing everything out.
The track design seems almost purposely made to catch you out rather than challenge you. At the end of the Kenya stage they have you on a long, fast drifty corner to the finish line where they've plonked down a bunch of spectators behind a flimsy plastic fence. If you hit them its a 5 second penalty and a restart to add even more time. It just seems like they put it there for artificial difficulty.
The music to this deserves special criticism too. It seems they only licenced one terrible Rap-Rock song for the menu music that restarts after every race and is constantly playing at a distracting level. It's also such a bad song that I found myself taking my headphones off during menus until I just turned the music off altogether.
Often times in these games some entertainment can come from the huge crashes you get when you mess up. I sucked royally at Dirt but there was fun to be had in watching what happened when a rally car completely misses a corner in a snow laden forest and careens at 100 mph into a tree. You can't even enjoy that in VR4 because the physics engine is so terrible crashes just look silly and unrealistic. Damage is just deformed panels but not even in a realistic way they just crumple inwards making the stubby car models look even more absurd.
If you have GWG and you claimed this for free you'll spend an hour or so playing it just in silent awe of how badly they messed it up. This should be a no-brainer average title. Take a basic rally game with decent physics and controls, slap the V Rally name on there and you're onto a winner. They somehow missed with this and missed by a wide margin.
I could not recommend that anybody, however much of a fan of V Rally, Rallying or Racing Games pay any amount of money for this game. It's poorly designed, poorly made and most damningly of all; simply not fun. There are just so many better options out there whether you want rallying or just racing as a matter of fact pretty much every other option I've played is a better option than this. It's one of the worst racing games I have played for a very long time.… Expand
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