Colin McRae Rally 2.0 Review

To be really good at it, you'll have to listen to Nicky Grist, Colin's faithful navigator. Pay attention to what he says. He will always suggest you the optimal speed for each bend, and warn you of possible obstacles...

The levels are varied, and you'll be able to drive in eight countries altogether: from the Finish wastes, dry mountains of Greece, and snowy Sweden to Kenya and Australia. The graphics are not the best that I have seen, but I did enjoy the versatility of sites. I think this game comes right after Need for Speed when it comes to versatility of terrains. The abundance of trees, bushes, objects, signs and rock will really leave a good impression. Well the fact is that most of these "models" are just plain-old 2D sprites that remain perpendicular to the camera, regardless of your position. There are also some people standing around, presented only with static textures. Then again, you are moving very quickly, and there sure are a lot of them, so they don't look too bad... The rest of the screen is filled with good background textures, or in some cases, invisible walls that would prevent you from falling into lakes. Then, there's the snow effect, and the rain, and some very nice lighting effects at dawn. I also liked some details like tire tracks on asphalt; tire marks in snow, reflection of the stoplights on ice... When you run into a part of the track covered in leaves, the leaves will start flying all around...

The camera placement is standard for this type of games. I have to point out that this is one of the rare games where it was actually interesting to play with the cockpit view. And just like in V-Rally 2, you'll be able to manually determine the position of the chase cam.

There are three levels of difficulty (novice, intermediate i expert). Initially you will only be able to choose one of the first two, and you'll have to win a rally championship on intermediate level, that is come 1st in the Class A and Class B Championships at intermediate level in order to unlock the third one. Your opponents have been well tweaked, and you will have no trouble with weaker opponents, but some of the harder ones may give you some trouble. The only trouble with them seamed to be that they are quite good on some tracks, but perform rather poorly on some other. For instance, they gave me quite a hard time in France, but I could completely relax and take my time in Sweden.

After each race you can watch the replay. For some reason the replays were much slower than the game itself, and I didn't like the camera movement, which would often collide with cars.

Apart from the single player modes, there is also a split screen multiplayer mode for two or four players. For some reason (and it might have to do with the fact that my first game on Commodore 64 had been Pole Position) I always had a relatively good opinion towards the games that featured this mode of play.

Colin McRae Rally 2.0 is currently one of the best rally games. There are many things that should be corrected, but it will provide an average rally fanatic with everything he might desire...