Some year ago I downloaded an earlier demo of
Xpand Rally to play it on my laptop and it was kinda fun, so I decided to give this one a go.
The menu is really cluttered and doesn't really flow, so you have to click around wildly to set everything up as you want. Diving right into the game, the first negative point; Apparently Techland, developer of Xpand Rally didn't have the money to buy license to add in real cars. Instead you have to live with near-exact copies of real cars with funny names such as "Lion 2007" for the Peugeot 207. Having selected my car I get to the "tuning" menu. I can chose from various parts, named "Motor 1", "Motor 2" and "Motor 3" leaving me clueless if the one with the highest number is the best or if they're different for different situations. I chose to not "mount" anything to my car and just race.
Racing is not as fun as it used to be. The controls are icky and if you steer too far to one side, the car doesn't move smoothly but stutters into that direction. The co-pilot is comparable to microsoft sam, both in pronunciation and in voice pitch, making it unbearable to have it activated. There are also numerous collision bugs, such as 10 cm high stones acting as solid walls not letting you pass above it (with a rally car in a rally game, mind you). I tried both tracks and both cars (their behavior doesn't differ) and it wasn't much fun.
Graphics are also outdated and do not impress at all, they're average at best. To be honest, why the developer chose to publish that game is beyond me. It's not comparable to the good ones such as richard burns rally and even the colin mcrae rally 5 of 2004.
A let down.
