SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: Richard Burns Rally

Being very eagerly awaited and anticipated by sim-heads, does it live up to the promise of it being the most “realistic” rally sim experience available on the PC today? Is it indeed “Porno for Petrolheads”, as is stated by PC Gamer on the back of the box?

Yes. It most definately does! And is.

Realism is hard to define for anyone who’s never actually been driving these cars in real life. I haven’t either, but Richard Burns Rally certainly feels “authentic”, which perhaps is a better word than realistic.

This is indeed a Simulation with a capital “S”. I would class it close to the likes of Papyrus sims. That’s how good I find the physics of Richard Burns Rally.

So if you get bored easily, or frustrated by hardcore sims that may feel difficult to the casual gamer, you should probably stop reading now, and go do something else than read the rest of this review.

Still here? I’m glad.

So you like a challenge, just as long as the rewards are sweet? Read on.

Let's start off with the first thing you do when bringing home the sim.

Installation

Installation is pretty straightforward; just point to where you want the install to be located on you hard-drive.

First time I double-clicked the icon to start the sim, I got a bit of a nasty surprise; After a nice, short intro video — which can be disabled by making a small change in the RichardBurnsRally.ini file — it CTD'ed while loading.

Turned out that I had to upgrade my video drivers (Geforce 4 Ti 4200 8x AGP) to Forceware 61.77, as the sim will not run if your videocard does not support pixel shading.

Setup

My Logitech Momo Force was correctly identified and set up by the sim, one moment of confusion here because in the controller setup screen there's an option to assign combined pedals to one axis, which I most emphatically did not want it to do.

Making sure the accellerator is assigned to one axis and the brake pedal to another axis solved this little issue — that way I can brake and accelerate at the same time, which is a must in this sim. I just left the setting for combined axis at it's default value.

Let me just mention that owners of some steering wheels (Thrustmaster / Guillemot) have reported trouble with getting force feedback to work, and some with very high-end equipment — the kind that will set you back financially the equivalent of between one and two months worth of wages, have experienced difficulty in assigning the axises correctly.

Sci / Wharthog are reported to be working on a patch, so hopefully a fix will be offered soon. If you own a Logitech, you should be good to go. If you’re in doubt, check the forums at Blackhole Motorsports or Racesim Central before you buy.

Force feedback for my Momo Force was set to full. I couldn't wait any longer and had to hit the track!

Go To Page 2

Click here to go to top of this page.