The arcade racing fever has been in full effect these past few years and now it’s time for a new game that harkens back to the golden age of driving like mad and looking great doing it with Victory Heat Rally, from developer Sky Devil Palm, released in association with Playtonic Friends.
As the name suggests, the game does indeed have rally elements in it, with a heavy emphasis in drifting and boosting, with races taking place at just about every possible environment a car can drive through, and then some. It’s a cartoony game full of exaggerated characters and surprisingly simple to grasp gameplay that everyone can enjoy, regardless of their previous experience with the games that it obviously takes inspiration from.
Be it Sega’s OutRun or even then Namco-developed perennial classic Ridge Racer, it would be unfair to say that Victory Heat Rally is just a sum of their parts under a stylish coat of pretty pixel art. The game surely borrows from those and a number of others, it would be silly for me not to at least mention that, but through some smoothing of what used to be way trickier to perform, Rally will have you skirting through corners like a pro in no time at all.
There are a handful of modes to be played, all standards that you expect to see in such a racer, such as arcade and time trial, but the cherry has got to be the career, where you take your favorite driver and settings up against the competition in a gauntlet of races and events all around a fictitious but still recognizable globe. It’s a series of cups that grow exponentially in difficulty the further you get it, really challenging you to be on the top of your drifting game.
In all honesty, playing this game made me feel like the time I was hooked on Mario Kart DS, racing online practically all of my free time. Snaking, a concept that came into being on that one particular entry in Nintendo’s spin-off series was paramount to your success then as it is in Victory Heat Rally. Basically, you have to keep boosting at every turn and straight away if you hope to come out on top in later stages.
Surely, that might sound a bit repetitive in the grand scheme of things, but it doesn’t thanks to just how quick races tend to go by here, a matter of minutes, and can easily be replayed if needed. It’s the type of experience that you can jump in and out of and still feel like you had a good time doing so, decently rewarding at that.
Visually, Heat Rally is a joy. Characters are simply adorable and are full of personality, including the on-site reporter who introduces every race in the format of a TV broadcast, talking about the track and sometimes giving you pointers on what to expect. Honestly, the game didn’t even need any of the lines of text that she delivers as it’s already very eye-catching to begin with, and those short intermissions only add to that allure.
The illusion of movement in this will make you recall games from the 16-bit and DOS generation in the way that it all looks like an old school belt scroller, with your car seemingly stationary in the middle of the screen. Your chubby little ride flips, spins and burns rubber as you plop in and out of corners, adorably taking out any opponents who are unlucky to be in your path. All in the name of fun, though, they are all all right, see, they respawn seconds later!
Victory Heat Rally is the sort of happy-go-lucky game that I can get behind: it’s incredibly easy to get into and there’s plenty of fun to be had with little to no previous experience. It’s a blast to play and you’ll be busy finishing everything that there is to be seen in it, unlocking new drivers and a bunch of vehicle do-dads as you do so. It’s a neat release to be sure.
