SEGA Rally Online Arcade Review
As one of the half-dozen European gamers to have actually owned a Sega Saturn back in the 90’s, I have fond memories of the original Sega Rally — one of the first arcade racers to successfully make the transition to home consoles. 16 years later, the franchise is still going strong, as Sega takes it onto Xbox Live with the release of Sega Rally Online Arcade.
This is a game to appeal to arcade racer junkies and Sega fans from years gone by, and exchanges the grit and realism of most modern racing games for an accessible, simple, fun racing experience. It’s something you can quickly dip in and out of without concerning yourself with the likes of career modes and suspension tweaks. In a world where most racing titles are realistic almost to the point of being slightly pretentious (hey there, Gran Turismo 5), Sega Rally is a breath of fresh air.
Re-using art assets from 2007’s Sega Rally Revo and 2008’s Sega Rally 3, the game’s visual style is pure, distilled Sega. It uses the same bright, vivid, primary-color-laden palette that stood out so well in arcades all over the world 15 years ago, although whether you’d describe this as being “stylized” or “dated” probably depends on how fondly you remember earlier Sega racers.
However, the simpler, cluttered visuals do mean that Sega Rally Online Arcade boasts a silky-smooth frame rate. It’s difficult to tell whether it’s actually locked at 60 frames per second, but regardless, you probably won’t notice any slowdown, even with the mud starts flying.
The game’s announcements, audio stingers also stay true to the Sega Rally series’ proud heritage. This includes the classic Sega Rally co-driver, who’ll dutifully serenade you with the likes of “very long easy right maybe”, though thankfully he no longer blurts out “woah!” every time you scrape inelegantly around a corner.
The soundtrack is composed of what I can only describe as “Sega rock” — the kind of generic, synthetic rock music that blends so well into the background of a video game that you probably won’t ever notice it. Veteran Sega fans will know exactly what I’m talking about.
When it comes to actual gameplay, you’ve got a reasonably-sized single player experience, at least considering the fact that this is an Xbox Live Arcade title. There are five tracks to see, ranging from deserts to jungles to alpine peaks, and a host of well-known rally cars in which to tear them up. With a wealth of previous titles to draw content from, it’s a little surprising that Sega only included five tracks in this game, however each stage that has made it across is unique in its own way.
The differences between the cars are largely cosmetic, but at least that means you can pretend you’re 10 again and choose a vehicle based on its color or the size of its spoiler, rather than some arbitrary engine statistic.
The main single player game mode is campaign mode, and this consists of four back-to-back races during which you work your way up the pack, hoping to come out on top by the final lap of the last track. There’s a moderate difficulty curve as you progress, though it’s nowhere near as punishing as earlier Sega Rally titles. Whereas the original Sega Rally would brutally and repeatedly clean your clock in later campaign mode stages, Online Arcade merely shrugs and throws in the occasional hairpin to try to throw you off.
There’s a similarly low skill ceiling in single race mode. On the “canyon” track, the easiest in the game, you can probably never take your finger off the accelerator and still finish in the top three. This is by no means a difficult game.
Time trial mode extends the single player game’s replayability somewhat, with downloadable ghost cars for various lap records, and there are even some bonus vehicles to unlock. But most of staying power of Sega Rally Online Arcade lies in the online part.
In addition to a local multiplayer option, the online component matches you against other gamers, and quickly throws you into a lobby where more challenging human opponents await. Player counts aren’t massive, as you’d expect form an XBLA title, but there are enough people currently playing to make it easy to find a match with at least one other human being present. And the matchmaking system is usually fast enough to get you racing within a minute or so.
The long-term success of Sega Rally Online Arcade depends on how much of a community forms around its online component, and at the time of writing this is something that remains to be seen. A best-case scenario would be a bustling hard-core of players challenging each other on a daily basis. A more pessimistic prediction might involve the game flat-lining just weeks after release. Time will tell.
My biggest complaint, though, centers around an aspect of Sega Rally Online Arcade that could arguably earn it most of its sales — the nostalgia factor. Gameplay-wise, little has changed since the 1995 original, and in many ways the series seems a little too eager to cling to the past. This risks alienating new players who have no experience of Sega Rally. To them, Online Arcade might seem like a boring, dated experience.
But still, as an XBLA title, Sega Rally Online Arcade isn’t really trying to topple the likes of DiRT or Forza. Instead, it asks for a few hundred Microsoft points and delivers a solid few hours of nostalgia-fuelled entertainment in return.
You could criticize Sega Rally Online Arcade for being a hotch-potch of earlier Sega Rally games, thrown together to make a quick buck on XBLA, but that wouldn’t be entirely fair. It’s still a decent title, just one with nostalgia at the heart of its game experience. And for 800 MS points, Sega junkies could certainly do a lot worse.
Sega Rally Online Arcade is available now on Xbox Live Arcade at a cost of 800 Microsoft points.
