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

There are lots of setup options, so many that some potential drivers might be intimidated. Just ignore them for the time being if you’re not comfortable with terms like differential, shocks, dampers, gearing ratios. You should only go here once you are able to drive consistent times and know what you would expect from making any given change to the setups.

The default setups are more than sufficient and you’ll want to get a good feel for each car’s individual handling characteristics before you’ll eventually want to go explore the game-within-the-game: The garage-sim.

Currently I haven’t explored this aspect yet, but I can’t wait to get greasy fingers.

You never see the AI, so there's not much to say about that. A nice touch would be if you could watch the AI drive the stages, but that's not possible.

User Interface

Why oh why is there no mouse-support in the menus?! Instead you have to navigate the menus with the keyboard. This is plain silly, and you have the inevitable confirmation prompts that such a menu design will present you with again and again: Do you really want to quit? Do you really want to do this and do you really want to do that? A shame really, because the menus in themselves look nice and are in most cases pretty well laid out. Exception to the rule here is that you have to look in your driver profile to load a replay.

Graphics

The tracks look expectionally good and authentic. Having watched the real rally of Japan, the resemblance in this sim is stunning. Photoreal, like being there, or watching it on TV. There are lots of details like trees, logs, grass, shrubbery and objects like fallen timber, rocks, sometimes hidden behind the shrubbery and low vegetation and occasionally you’ll see a flock of birds take to the sky right in front of you as they are alerted by the roar of your engine.

As you speed through the stages, dare-devil photograpers jump away from the track at the last possible moment — be careful not to collect one with your car!

The cars look very nice when viewed externally, the in car cockpit view is a bit basic I fear, but I must also admit that when I'm driving I don't have time to notice it. And in my first week of Richard Burns Rally, I’ve come to like it a lot actually. The standard in-car view (below) gives a good view of the road ahead. On the following page, you'll see an inside shot showing driver and co-driver. This shot was taken using the CameraHack mod.

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