Excellent but lonely rally game
As its name suggests, Rally Trophy is a racing game which lets players go off-road and experience the thrills of high speed driving through a variety of real world locations. It features a number of classic rally cars, including the Mini Cooper, Ford Escort, and the Alfa Romeo Giulia, all of which are recreated in loving detail. Likewise, the courses, which cover five countries from Sweden to Kenya to Russia, are equally gorgeous, with accurate representations of differing surfaces and weather conditions and plenty of great textures and graphical effects. Damage is also realistically represented, with broken lights and dented bumpers modelled to high levels of accuracy, and which impact on your driving, so you really need to look after your car to succeed. Adding to the challenge is the physics system and the lack of driver assistance, which makes it really feel like you are taking part in an actual race. In keeping with real-life rallying, the courses are very much endurance races, lasting for substantial lengths of time, further testing your skills and adding to the gruelling nature of the game. The only real problem with Rally Trophy is one that is inherent to this style of racer: you are only ever racing against the clock, with no direct competition or other drivers on the track, so it can look pretty empty out there. If you can accept this, then you are sure to have a wild and challenging time and Rally Trophy really is up there with Colin McRae: DIRT as one of the greats.
