the art of rally starts you with small, nimble, slow, classic rally cars. Quick through the turns and stable, a great introduction to throttle control and gear selection. Instead of fast acceleration and all-wheel drive, the cars' nimbleness and lack of acceleration teach you a lesson in car control and momentum management. The goal is to not just floor it and careen through every corner on the knife edge but know the fast way around a corner isn't always a scandanavian flick.
But sometimes it is. 😈
It takes a long time to learn to go quickly in art of rally, but you're eased in with cars that you and twenty drunk multi-racial rectuangular Finns could haul out of a ditch in five seconds or less, and with competitors who are also finding all the ditches, dropping their cigarette, making wrong turns, and generally less reliable than you. Just focus on getting through the stages at a speed you could drive IRL, and on learning the characteristics of the cars because every one of the cars are fun, and funny. The turbo-lag in the "das 119e" for example made it notorious for killing its mid-life married-man drivers, and thus:
It takes a long time to Git Gud, learning new classes was always a step up in difficult and reward. Rally is a dangerous sport, it's clear why Group B was the end of a rocket-ship trajectory of power, technology, speed, and danger. While the FIA's top-class WRC is strictly homologated, and Group A lives on, there are folks out there pushing the boundaries of power in their own ways, asking "will it hoon?" as they drift a monster of a BMW or Ford Fiesta through a crowd. Some folks say that hooniganism's not to be mistaken for or compared to Rally Racing, and frankly I'm not the person to weigh in, i'm just trying to get through Normarkku in the rain. We went from hooning this BMW to nearly always having the das 119e on the road in a week or less.
There are four five regions, each consisting of an open-world free-roam with some stages set on there, and stand-alone stages often modeled after famous stages from the real world region. The famous mountain touges of Japan's Mount Haruna and the wind mills of Sardenia, etc etc, but beware the tombstones of Germany.
It's not always easy to haul ass, and there are stages and rallies and entire car classes I'd prefer to avoid, but inevitably I'd find myself powering a rainbow colored Lancia through a cheering crowd as the highlights of the soundtrack slam through the sound of the turbocharger.
but always, always, always I'd humbled by an unseen bump, a corner read incorrectly, a house I should've seen coming... luckily the crowds mostly get out of the way, and the ones who can't or won't don't have enough pixels to care.
Some of the cars were quite exotic, one of the few Russian rally cars was the "T-22", based on a car called the Lada Samara EVA which was produced in small numbers but never saw real running. It's some lovely space-age soviet stuff, and it goes like a rabbit:
The Group A cars were based on road-cars which were just starting to gain the benefit of computerization, traction control and ABS were available with 800 HP under the hood, to keep the widow count from falling too low. The cars in art of rally's Group A are the sorts of things you could find on the streets of Seattle today, a hopped up 90s Suburu STI or a Toyota Celica "liftback".
If you ever find yourself charging down Mount Haruna, and Do It For Takumi comes on, make sure you don't miss your braking point. :)
If you ever find yourself in possession of one of the handful of PS5s in existence, the art of rally does an incredible job modeling the car control with the PS5's haptic controls, you can feel the car hook, you can feel it shift, you can feel each tire slip. Incredible.