SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: Xpand Rally

Car damage seems to be a weaker aspect of the game, You will suffer cracked or completely broken windshields and the bonnet will occasionally fly off, but even major crashes involving rolling the car and sending it headlong into assured destruction at the bottom of the Grand Canyon hardly leaves any dents in the bodywork.

Yes, you can even experience the free fall into the deep crevice. In car the effect is great, but when you check the replay afterwards it doesn't look quite as spectacular because the bodywork is hardly damaged and the most worrying aspect is that quite often you are respawned after a couple of seconds and can continue on your merry way. In reality, the car ought to be considerably damaged and undriveable after such a fall.

Xpand Rally features yet another innovation in the way it mimics and displays information regarding the health of the driver. After a major crash the driver will be experiencing anything from a mild dazed state to severe trauma. It is even possible that the driver-injury sustained will be so severe that it means retirement from the stage.

When recovering after a major crash, it is difficult to tell if it is the damage is to the car, if it has injured the driver, or if it's both factors combined to make the car drive differently and make the control of the car more difficult. Whether this is hot or not, I'll let you decide. In a way it must be said that Techland have done a great deal to bring new things to a racing title, but I probably prefer car damage alone.

Physics

With all the good points to Xpand Rally like well organized menus that work with the mouse, good graphics, a very well laid out and exhaustive career part that will keep you occupied for a very long time, easy to use multiplayer, editors that most certainly will help keep the game fresh as new tracks, stages and cars will be added by modders, it would be absolutely brilliant if Xpand had good physics as well to complete the list.

Sadly this is where the game stumbles a bit. I have tried every possible combination of simulation-mode and arcade-mode, using the slowest cars and the fastest cars, driving with no add-on car parts and with all add-on car parts, switching between 900 and 200 degrees of steering lock. I used slow steering and ultra-fast steering, and although Xpand Rally seems to be very generous in the numerous ways that you can adjust saturation, linearity and dead-zone, I haven't found a completely satisfactory setup.

I find that the steering into turns is either too fast or too slow, but always initially laggy and then very twitchy.

I have for now settled for a 270 degree steering lock with almost full saturation and a medium-fast steering setup for the cars. This lets me broadslide in most turns, minimizing the dead-zone I feel in the game-engine. And this is after having assured myself that my controller is calibrated for 0% deadzone, that the in-game deadzone is set to 0% and that the steering is set to linear.

This leads me to the conclusion that there is a problem in the controller code and not a setup problem or a related problem which cars / add-on parts I select. Part of the problem here is perhaps the utter lack of sound from skidding on gravel as there are no audio clues as to what the car is doing except for the engine noise, and that is not enough. Having said that, the Mini Cooper — ah, excuse me — the Tiny Hooper was quite fun to chuck around.

The different cars do have their individual characteristics and this is a very good thing, but the acid test to determine if we should categorize XR as a "simulation" is about to begin.

A simulation lets us do maneuvers in the simulation that work in real life, and it should produce the same results.

In Xpand Rally, it is not a good idea to lift off the throttle before a turn, because that will result in the car being completely impossible to turn, even at low speeds. This means you cannot shift the weight of the car forward for throttle lift assisted turn-in's. And there is no setup options that will let you adjust things such as the differential to give you power-off oversteer.

Negotiating hairpins I found that the handbrake is practically useless as it is impossible to swing the rear-end of the car by pulling the handbrake. And due to the general twitchyness, I can't do Scandinavian Flicks in XR.

When applying the foot-brake, momentum for the slower cars is quickly lost, so you slow down almost to a stop and then you have to mash the throttle in order to persuade the car to turn round.

When entering faster corners, I found that the best way to do so is to keep the throttle floored, tap the brake and yank the steering wheel in the desired direction. The nose will turn in and you can keep up momentum. That way you can broadslide. But if you overdo it, you'll get huge slides and even counterslides if you overcorrect for the first slide.

While this is entirely correct behavior, I get the old "one-point pivot" sensation doing these stunts. Add to that the controller issues I've addressed, and the general level of satisfaction I get from driving XR is not terribly high.

In the above sections I've concentrated on the physics as they act when on gravel. What about tarmac?

Using the tarmac test stage I was a bit disappointed again. In my opinion the cars feel like they float and once again I find I can't use driving techniques I have learned in GPL, NASCAR Racing 2003 season or Richard Burns Rally, like cutting the corners and carrying more speed through them. In XR, cutting the corner... just cuts the corner.

One thing I noticed is that the speeds with which you can enter the corners on tarmac are way too high, probably due to large amounts of grip.

A very nice thing that I want to commend Techland for is for not putting in any gizmo's to artificially enhance the speed-sensation.

One other producer of rally games (who shall remain nameless) quite happily announced that they had "overclocked" their game engine by one third in order to "up" the speed sensation. As I tried their demo I was horrified. But that is another story and we had better get back to Xpand Rally.

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