At its best, #Drive Rally feels a bit like what’d happen if Colin McRae was in Crazy Taxi, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement

The rallying part of #Drive Rally is pretty good.

It’s not going to knock the sims that currently sit at the head of what’s become a more niche mini-genre than rally fans would like – largely due to WRC’s inability to properly re-capture the zeitgeist to the extent it did in the early 80s, late 90s, and early 2000s – off their pedestal. But, after about five hours so far, I can tell you the game’s arcadey lobbing of automobiles down muddy tracks art the kind of speed usually reserved for those who think they’ve left the gas on after heading out go on holiday is entertaining.

You’ll be flung headlong down a tight trail in cars that range from pretty much stock to ‘someone’s bought their body kit from NASA’ – the latter in a good way – with some poor passenger yelling at you to prepare to take a hairpin properly so that they don’t end up getting overly-acquainted with the foliage.

The game has four different regions, offering different surroundings and challenges, and helping fulfil the whole turbo-infused sightseeing vibe that’s long been a part of rallying. While they’re limited by a lack of different weather conditions to spice them up, each of the German woods, Arizona-style desert, Scandinavian snowy tundra, and south-east Asian inspired coastline have enough unique landmarks and challenges to feel distinct.

Stage design-wise, while things can feel a bit turn-heavy when you’re in the slowest set of cars to start off with, by the time you’ve graduated to the fastest, there’s a good mix of flowing sections and big stop-laden tight loops. While their nice visual differentiation is a bit let down by many using the same stock engine note despite being very different vehicles – i.e a bulky 4×4 sounding just like a supercar – the wheels on offer represent a nice range of parody rally classics and slightly more out of left field choices. A not-quite Lamborghini Countach might not look as at home on dirt as an almost Audi Quattro, but both feel like they belong in Drive Rally’s world.

That world, though, is a bit more of a mixed bag. The main mode of the game – championships – sees you race in four different championships set in the four locales I mentioned earlier. The stages get longer and longer as you unlock three new base cars initially, and then two faster souped-up versions of each. It feels like you’re racing yourself at times, since you never see or hear from your pretty anonymous opponents, and aren’t racing for any big trophy at the end of it all, but the game does at least manage the challenge you’ll face from the competition well.

While I rarely struggled, and it didn’t feel like it mattered when I did as progression was always forthcoming, things do ramp up as you progress. Faster cars require a much defter touch to guide around at full chat without ending up smashing through and into roadside furniture. You generally get about three stages with each car variant at a time, with the first couple of stages providing you with a cosmetic part – rims, bumpers, spoilers – you can use to customise your ride a bit. The options are limited to two variants per part locked specifically to the three different versions of each car, so there’s not a huge amount of personalisation to be done, but just enough to make it a worthwhile addition.

Each championship has its own team that comes with a unique co-driver, generally designed to match the place you’re blazing through stages in. For the alpine Holzberg, there’s an Austrian lad called Hans who sounds almost exactly like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Toto Wolff, the American desert gets a literal cowboy, and then – for some reason – Scandinavia gets a Californian valley girl. Yeah, I don’t get that last one either, but at least she didn’t leave me feeling a bit uncomfortable.

The final co-driver, for the south-east asian region, is a guy called Jack whose dialogue and delivery sometimes resembles a borderline offensive stereotype. He speaks with an accent that sounds like someone doing an impression you’d tell them off for, occasionally skipping words in sentences and likening what’s happening to, ninjas, dragons and kung fu. You could argue that Hans is along similar lines, constantly mentioning German precision and stuff like that, but Jack feels a bit more problematic a portrayal in comparison. I’m all for trying to create in-your-face characters that contrast the pretty faceless drivers and co-drivers you get in a lot of racing games, but you can do that without boiling different nationalities/creeds down to this extent.

It’s a real shame, to be honest, because I like the idea of filling the co-drivers with personality in theory, and it actually works pretty well across the rest of the game, even if it can get pretty annoying after a few hours. As the kind of game I might recommend to folks who feel they’re not quite ready for the kind of in-depth rally sim that’s geared towards you having a wheel and some knowledge of what goes into the real thing, being a bit less dry fits with what I’d want from a game like #Drive Rally.

At its best, the game feels like a refreshingly simple thing you can pick up at a moment’s notice and have fun blasting through, with the co-drivers feeling like the kind of bizarre passengers you might pick up if you were playing some kind of Colin McRae-infused Crazy Taxi. In its current form, there’s just enough content and customisation to keep you occupied for as much time as this kind of indie should aim to deliver.

It’s a good step from a developer in Pixel Perfect Dude that’s gradually branching out from a background that mainly looks to be mobile-centric. With a bit of further refinement, it could turn into a very good addition to a mini-genre that’s proven through the likes of Art of Rally – though that is a very different game vibe-wise to #Drive Rally – that it has space for smaller studios offering quirky takes that help equal things up in our current sea of uber-realistic racing.

However, if it’s going to hit those heights and build on what is a fun core as it races on down the early access trail, there’s some work to be done and maybe some lessons to be learned.