Sega Rally Revo
October 24,2007 - For all of Lumines creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi's creations, Sega Rally Championship is by far the most conventional. In a sea of music-themed puzzle games and abstract shooters, Sega Rally Championship is a straight-up arcade rally-racing game. It has also been released quite sparingly for a series spanning 12 years. This new release, Sega Rally Revo, is only the fourth game to bear the Sega Rally brand, and that's if you count the rather obscure PAL-only release, Sega Rally 2006, for the PlayStation 2.

The new developer, Sega Racing Studio, knew it had to make a big splash with Mizuguchi out of the picture, and Sega Rally Revo definitely adds something very new to the series in the form of the Geo-Deformation system. This is an impressive display of coding; although the game is entirely devoid of car damage-modeling, all the tracks your car makes throughout the game's numerous circuits will stay put throughout the entire balance of the race you're taking part in, affecting traction as you make subsequent laps. A lot of the time, it may just feel like a nice graphical touch, but you'll really start to feel it if you happen to dig deep into a hairpin turn on an early lap, and there's an inexplicable sense of pure fun that comes from tracking water down a dirt straightaway.

The meat of the game plays out in the form of several series races, where you will vie for points against five other drivers, which both determine your standing in the series race and go toward unlocking more series races and rally cars. Unfortunately, Sega Rally Revo really offers nothing quite like the 10-Year Championship mode from Sega Rally 2 on the Dreamcast, which offered hours of challenge with really good replay value seven years ago, and would've been really interesting to see given the next-gen treatment. It's just one series race after another, forcing Sega Rally Revo to get by strictly on its gameplay, which is thankfully very solid in the face of some unfortunate flaws.

On the subject of flaws, one of the biggest is the implementation of invisible walls. It's not so much that we've yet moved into an era where invisible walls are unforgivable, but the placement thereof in Sega Rally Revo is a little too conservative (more so than any previous installment of the series), and thus, always carry with them the risk of slamming your car into the evil steel shrubs of death. Another big annoyance is the lack of aesthetic diversity between tracks. Each of the game's tracks is thrown into one of a handful of archetypes, such as Safari, Alpine, or Canyon, with a distinguishing number on the end. The actual track layout is pretty varied throughout the game, but with the same general look and BGM for every track within each archetype, it can get more than a little repetitive.

In that light, Sega Rally Revo is lucky it's such a good game of off-road racing at the core. The driving is as frenzied and chaotic as you've come to expect from the Sega Rally series, without the actual sense of speed getting too out-of-hand. The deeper problems aren't entirely forgivable – particularly the repetitive track/music design and the limited single-player experience, as those greatly affect the replay value – but it needs to be reiterated that Sega Rally Revo isn't a bad game, either. It handles well, the actual circuits are fun and challenging to navigate, and it'll most certainly give you the hours you'll ask of it, especially if you're already a fan of arcade or rally racing games.

Visually, there's a lot of give-and-take that just comes with the development philosophy behind Sega Rally Revo. Geo-Deformation comes at the apparent cost of damage-modeling, which actually comes off as a good decision, considering Geo-Deformation tends to lend itself much better to rally racing than damage-modeling has in the past. Sega Rally Revo is clearly a technical breakthrough for racing games, and that has to be noted, absolutely. Also, the sight of significant dirt, mud, snow, and water being kicked up from underneath your car is always very exciting, but may have been the cause of some frame-droppage that creeps up during the most intense moments. The biggest offense to the game's sense of style is the fact that there's just too much consistency in the way of how each track looks next to others within its particular type, combined with having a single BGM for each circuit type. This has an unusual and unfortunate effect, artificially making the game feel much more plodding and repetitive than it really is. The soundtrack itself is actually good, there just needs to be more to it, because even the best music gets tiresome if you play it to death.

Sega Rally Revo has its market and it knows it. You probably won't change your mind about arcade or rally racing games because of this game, but if this is your genre already, or you've just liked the past Sega Rally titles, feel free to jump straight in behind the wheel. Everyone else may proceed with caution, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't proceed at all. The average player might just get too frustrated with Sega Rally Revo's problems to stick around for the solid game that lies beneath the surface.

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