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0 Exo Rally Championship is the latest exoplanetary racing sim by Exbleative (Exo One). Take rally style racing to the starts and compete in challenging courses across terraformed planets. Explore the surfaces in free roam or kick things up a notch with time trials. With publishing by Future Friends Games (Tiny Aquarium, Clover Pit), roll on up today with it only on Steam.
Speed Isn’t Everything in Exo Rally Championship
Racing games have been around forever but I’ve never really been drawn to the more in-depth ones. Arcade style racing games, like Cruisin’ USA and San Francisco Rush were more my style. I never got into the more realistic games like the Grand Turismo series. Though I’m only vaguely familiar with rally style racing in real life, Exo Rally Championship looks like it is somewhat outside the norm. Obviously with an extraplanetary setting, it’s no doubt this is the case. What about you reader? Any particular racing series that come to mind? While you think on that, check out my review for this one below.
Gameplay
Exo Rally Championship is a rally style racing simulator set away from Earth and across several different planet surfaces. Each of the planets provide both natural and terraformed surfaces to compete against other computer or player racers. There are four different vehicle classes, which each handle quite differently, along with a multitude of race mode types and events to participate in. There are also daily and weekly challenges to complete for a chance at ranking on the leaderboards. The different racing series and challenges also allow you to customize the difficulty level of the AI racers as well as how realistic you want damage to your vehicle to be.
An early lesson in Exo Rally Championship is that speed really isn’t everything. Especially in these low-gravity environments. The slightest bump or overcorrection can send you flying or off and away from the checkmark you’re trying to hit. My minimal knowledge of rally racing of the modern age tells me that these are often competitions involving rough tracks and obstacles. Even some to the degree of necessitating a co-driver. In any case, being highly aware of surroundings and the track ahead are quite important. This game is no different, and even allows you use a drone to survey the course ahead of time and plot out a path and dangers in advance.
In addition to the different vehicle and challenge types, Exo Rally Championship allows for very deep tweaking of your vehicle. There are sliders and adjustments to be made for just about everything you can think of. This allows the player to fine-tune things to better suit your driving style, or simply adjust to compensate for the environment. I personally am very naive in the way of vehicle mechanics, so I just left those alone. As long as I took things slow when needed and tried to reserve my rocket fuel for wild rolls, I never felt like I was missing out by not doing so.
Graphics & Audio
The game graphics, at a default PC setting of 2k resolution, are quite vibrant. My only complaint would be that there is some camera clipping from time to time as it tries to keep up with you. Also, when it gets dark it gets very, very dark and the vehicle lights don’t do a whole lot for your immediate surroundings. There are bumps and trees aplenty in Exo Rally Championship.
The audio track in Exo Rally Championship is fairly chill. I honestly spent more time worrying about what I was seeing than what I was hearing most of the time. Though a couple of notes in that regard would be the inconsistency of when the dialogue has a full voiceover or not. That and the constant whining of the engine reminds me of playing with RC cars rather than rallying in space.
Longevity
If you’re really into racing simulators, Exo Rally Championship has a decent amount to offer. Though I spent more time that I would have liked restarting my races due to being stuck on trees and losing time. I did dabble in a few of the daily challenges as well. I’m not entirely sure if the leaderboard is currently working though, as I somehow was top of the leaderboard for a weekly one. Which is easy to do when there’s no one else on the board. But I definitely feel there is enough content present between the different series, events, time trials and weekly/daily challenges. At least as much as you could hope for with a racing game.
Final Thoughts
Exo Rally Championship is a fun time spent racing outside of the norm. It takes some getting used to and even on the lowest difficulty settings, completing various runs in a timely manner can prove difficult. The tutorial does a decent job of informing you how to best use your vehicle, but it doesn’t really get into more of the nitty gritty when it comes to tweaking them or really explaining how or when to use different tire sets and spares. If you’re a fan of racing games, especially those that are rally format, you should check it out. I’d have to give the game the Thumb Culture Gold Award.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
If you enjoy this review, be sure to check out my other reviews here.
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