Does driving on flat terrain fail to raise your adrenaline level? Do circles bore you to death? Are you tired of all those rude and obnoxious drivers who keep cutting you off or force you into cement walls? Eden Studios and Atari have rallied to your cries. Their solution is V-Rally 3, where you and your navigator tackle the untamed courses in European-influenced wonderlands.
For a sport that is rarely heard of or practiced in the United States, the fact that new rally games keep finding their way onto the Xbox is somewhat of a continual surprise. Xbox is already home to two distinguished rally racers, Colin McRae Rally 3 and Rallisport Challenge. With these contenders, what does V-Rally 3 bring to the Xbox to make it worthy of your time?
Gameplay
V-Rally 3 has all the basic features you'd find in other rally games. Tracks cover a range of locales such as Sweden, Finland, Germany, England, France, and Africa, and each locale contains four courses. Licensed rally cars such as the Subaru Impreza, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution 7, Citroen Xsara, Ford Focus, and other main manufacturers make an appearance with a total of 16 different cars. Racing modes are broken down into two parts, V-Rally, which is the career mode, and Quick Race, which is divided into Attack and Challenge.
The Attack mode is a simple time attack where amazingly your goal is to break previous best times. Challenge mode is a variation on time attack, where you must complete at the least three tracks, fluctuating dependent on the challenge, in a certain amount of time. The catch with Challenge mode is that each challenge is linked to a specific car and you have to beat Challenge 1 to progress to Challenge 2, etc.
V-Rally mode is the meat of V-Rally 3. Your overall goal is to move from the 1.6L FWD category up to champion of the 2.0L 4WD category. Your path of a rally car champion begins in the preseason, where you are sent emails by numerous teams offering you test drives. If you manage to complete a course under a given time without totaling the car, you will be offered a contract. In the contracts are a defined number of seasons you have to race for a given team and what position you need to finish in at the end of a rally. Succeed, and you will build up your reputation and be offered spots on better teams. Fail and you will be booted from your team and be forced to rebuild your status among your competitors.
When racing, V-Rally 3 feels like a cross between a simulation and an arcade racer, which gives V-Rally 3 a newbie friendly interface. The controls are very easy to pick up, and they follow a control scheme that has become standard among racers. You steer with the right analog stick steers, accelerate with the right trigger, and brake with the left trigger. Changing gears, if you're daring enough to race in manual, is done with X and A. And, for those all important power slides, the emergency brake is activated with B. You can change you view from behind the car to over the hood with Y.
Although all cars handle differently, steering remains a constant median between loose and tight steering. You have the option of taking them into the shop to be adjust the tires, chassis, and gearbox for different elemental conditions, V-Rally feels more like an arcade racer than a simulation, especially when compared to simulations like Colin McRae 3.
What perpetuates the arcade-like classification of the game, along with steering, is all the damage that can occur to your car while you're driving. I witnessed a lot of this during my not-so-collision free road tests. You can loose both front and rear bumpers and all the wheels to your car (which takes true talent). But, what is even more exciting is the internal damage you can accumulate, which can be anything from complete brake failure to a partially functioning transmission.
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