Review: Rally Master Pro
Score:
49%
It promises a lot, but when it comes down to it, Rally Master Pro has some fundamental flaws that make this the rally driving game that doesn’t feel.... like a rally driving game. Yes, it looks nice, but the title of the game catches out the Trades Description Act the second you start playing. Ewan finds out, to his sadness, why.
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Nokia once had the perfect mobile rally game – the original N-Gage’s Colin McRae Rally. You’d think that, having done it once, it would be easy enough for developers to use it as a reference point for modern gaming. Not in the case of Fish Labs and Rally Master Pro. While the graphics have been updated, the audio is significantly downgraded, the handling of the car feels more like a train set than a tiny forest track in Wales, and your navigator has gone from providing useful information to sounding like he’s swallowed a copy of De Bretts.
Really, what sort of person still says “constriction” in normal speech, let alone a rally navigator? I do wonder if Fish Labs have actually been out to do any rallying themselves. The navigation calls are nice, and they describe what’s going on, but they don’t sound at all true to life. And it’s moments like this that take you out of the gaming world and back to the real world. Moments which distract you from the game.
There’s a great graphics engine here, and it’s crying out to be hitched to a decent rally style game. Unfortunately this isn’t that game.
Rally Master Pro is the least “simulator” of the first batch of driving games for the new Symbian devices. The presentation is wonderful, with clear menus and smart background animations that make you feel the game has been polished by the developer. It’s just a shame that the actual driving doesn’t feel like a rally game (or even an arcade variant such as Sega Rally).
To me, a rally driving game is about balancing your car on the edge, pushing traction by juggling the acceleration and braking of the car (and in some cases relying on accelerating and braking at the same time), while making constant tiny adjustments to the steering because the car is never moving in the direction that it is pointing. That’s what happens in real life, and that’s what should happen in your game.
That’s not what happens here.
I’ve tried to get the car into a slide, I really have. The road surface is meant to be gravel, it should slip the second you turn into a corner at high speed and tap the brake; get into that, power slide round, correct and get the hammer down. Nope, the car just turns. If you entered too fast, then you hit the side of the road.
It feels more like a racing game with some incredibly grippy tyres and a perfectly solid driving surface. And while the frame-rate stays incredibly high, while the graphics are first rate for a mobile driving game, while everything whips around the screen with no lag… it just promises one gaming experience and delivers something completely different.
Putting the mis-selling of the game as a rally game aside, how much of a challenge is the game that you do get? It’s not bad, but there are a couple of areas that continue to let down this title. How about no engine noise? Yes, you can motor around the countryside in complete silence. That’s a bit pointless, isn’t it? Not only does it just sound wrong, but the engine note in many games is an audio clue to your speed and gearing – without that you have to look at the speedometer, which takes the focus away from the action.
Quite frankly, you could be in a low flying helicopter with ear defenders on, and this would probably handle the same way – except you’d have a machine gun.
And then there are the mini-games. After every second stage, you get the chance to repair your car. Now you could just leave your mechanics to do this (which makes a lot of sense, this is meant to be a driving game), but you can get more repairs done if you interfere and help them out. You help them with the sort of little puzzle games you’d expect as a single screen flash game (such as pressing a button when a line reaches a target or spinning round jigsaw pieces to create a continuous line).
Nice idea on paper, but I bought a driving game. If I want the damage repaired to any decent level, I have to play these games. Sorry, I’m not with the designers on this one. It’s a bad idea.
There is promise here, but it’s all in the graphics engine and presentation and not in the gameplay design. It’s not "end of the world disastrous", it’s just "a little bit nice". And yes, that is damning with faint praise. Fish Labs need to return to the drawing board with this one and start again with the tools they have. As it stands this is a 49% score – as high as we can score a game without actually recommending it.
-- Ewan Spence, Nov 2010.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at