Exo Rally Championship

the most refreshing racing game of this decade so far

A beautiful and solid sci-fi rally simcade. A perfect blend of space rovers in a Dakar/Baja-like rally race. It provides a pleasant handling simulation as well as room for strategy mechanics between stages. I just wish there was non-DRM release for this game. It would be ideal to preserve it.

Because "every stage is littered with approximately 74,000 bumps and if you hit even 1 of them while pointed more than 1.5 degrees from the optimal direction then you will be more last place than any human has ever been before" is not, in fact, good game design. Especially when the game's own tutorialized solution of using thrusters doesn't even work. Also whoever decided that the moon stage design was acceptable should be banished there forever.

yes i do recommend, it fulfills the rally across alien worlds fantasy. however there some things that got on my nerves: 1. almost no traction you have on some surfaces with some wheels is a bit annoying. I get the devs wanted you to need to think about the terrain and the wheels you take but i think they went too far. gets so much worse when it rains (it rains a lot). also it feels real punishing to pick one of the specialized wheels. they feel almost useless outside of the niche terrain type they are good at, but each race is a mix and you often cant change tires for 3 races so im not sure why you would pick them. 2. the fantasy of what you probably expected, fast dune buggy type thing with 6 axis of thrusters, only happens with 1/4 of the car classes and the 3rd one you get access to. sure theres now a sense of progression but i would have preferred to go balls out from the beginning

great idea, terrible execution. I don't care if it's realistic (it isn't), but a racing game where it takes 5, 10, 20 seconds to correct isn't fun, it's just frustrating.

Very happy with this game. Played it in demo and the full game just adds more of the same goodness with different planets and vehicles. Very very underrated. Deserves more publicity

Barely finished the tutorial-ish first series and this game scratches an itch I didn't know I had. It's a realistic sim but with actually novel mechanics!! The RCS really adds a ton of control and possibility to pull off maneuvers a terrestrial rally car could only dream of. The damage model (while not a new arrival to rally games in general) feels fresh and distinct, mostly because now it pertains to 6-wheeled vehicles with thrusters that can all be damaged in a myriad of ways. The races feel very good and demand a lot of careful and technical driving, which is exactly what I want out of a game like this. I'd also like to note that this is the most immersive racing game I've played to date. You can get an overview of the upcoming race with a free camera, only said camera is of course mounted on a drone. That drone can crash if you fly too low or too into a tree, which took me by surprise the first time I used it. Driving in a dusty environment can choke up both your brakes and your RCS, and you need to coerce your engines to spit it out by wasting some fuel on that. Driving in a storm will make your external cameras and drones act up, forcing you to switch to the cockpit view. It will also mess with your UI (which itself feels very diegetic) and sensors. There are some minor pain points for me though, the chief of them is a complete lack of visual customization. You can customize and tune a lot of internals, but the rover largely always looks the same (the only visible changes are the tires and seeing the suspension act differently). I would LOVE being able to modify how the rovers look (by changing out lights or cockpit shapes or some metal roll bars and other such greebles) or at least some sort of livery editor/importer, that would make this game a 10/10 for me personally Also, runs well on linux through proton out of the box

I would refund this game if I could. The premise, the setting, the visuals, they all are excellent. The experience is really bad. I didn't want to leave a review before at least unlocking all vehicles, but after several hours trying to find proper settings to make the first two vehicles comfortable to drive, I just couldn't be bothered anymore. Let's start with the good stuff. The idea of a rally championship on exoplanets is pretty good, the visuals are nice (albeit pretty devoid of life), and the game runs fine. And... That's it. The worst offender is the absolute lack of grip. I live in a mountain area, I drive on ice every winter. I don't know what the ground is made of on those planets, but it slips way more than real life ice. Sure, you can tweak a crap-ton of settings with the suspension and drive train to make it somewhat okay-ish, but it will still slip way, way, too much. I routinely drive at 70+ km/h on ice with simple winter tires, here I have a hard time keeping grip at 40 km/h (or maybe it's miles, the unit is never mentionend) on mud with the grippiest tires, the "paddle" ones, or any tire for that matter. If you start slipping in a turn you're gonna slip for tens of meters even at the lowly speed of 30-40 km/h. Again, real life ice doesn't slip that much, and trust me I know, I've gone sideways on iced-over roads more than once. The RCS system allows to compensate some of those flaws by selectively adding pressure on the front or overall, but it's still a problem. First, you have limited fuel for the RCS thrusters. Second, defying the laws of physics, they actually build up heat instead of venting it (if you use heat to transform a liquid into a gas and expell it, you're actually [i]cooling[/i] the engine). And finally, using a specialised system on cars from the future to return to baseline grip of current era vehicles is a real bummer. I'd expect it to be an improvement, not a crutch. Plus, despite being controlled by the right stick on controller, it's still only "on / off". The stick controls the direction of thrust, not the intensity, which makes it very impractical. Overall, if you're tempted by this game, just lower suspension stiffness and call it a day, and try to make do with that. What's even worse is that no matter how much time I tried setting things up, I never ended up with a build that was satisfying to drive, but I still was WAY ahead of the reference times. I feel I'm driving lke crap, bouncing about, losing control now and then, hardly being able to properly do a donut around those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ donut checkpoints (whoever thought those would be a good idea deserves a slap in the face), more often than not doing a crab impersonation when trying to take a turn by going sideways for way too many meters... But there hasn't been a single race I didn't win first place on the first try at default difficulty (75% is default). Yep, drunk driving on super-ice places me ahead of the "AI" (which doesn't exist, really) by at least 20 seconds, on each race, on first attempt, every time. I win against the game while feeling like I'm losing against my car. It is extremely unsatisfying. Then there are some minor annoyances, like the game spouting stuff now and then. "One hundred" or "two hundred" being the most commonly heard, but I haven't been able to relate them to anything useful. And you can't switch that off. Then, when I damaged something, some garbled AI-like voice told me what was damaged, in such an unintelligible voice that I have no idea what it actually was. The options leave a lot to desire too. Graphics options dont exist, it's all global, "low", "medium", "high", with no further details. No "depth of field on/off", for exemple. Control options don't have an "auto reverse" option. When driving on a wheel, I get it, but on a controller, it would be nice to have the option to just go backwards by using the brakes... Like, you know, in every single racing game ever made since the begining of time ? Instead, even if you're using the automatic gearbox, you have to manually shift to neutral, then reverse, then use the throttle. Which is undoubtedly better on a wheel, but really bad on a controller... And how are you going to use the RCS if you're using a wheel, anyway ? There are also some bugs, or what appears to be bugs. Not many of them, but still some. For exemple I've tried racing on the moon (great setting and and excellent idea by the way) but for some reason my automatic gearbox never switches to second gear no matter what. And the final touch, the interface sucks. Someone thought it was a good idea to default to replay instead of a proper after-race menu.While in-race, "retry" means "restart the race", while after race "try again" means return to the menu where you can configure your vehicle to THEN try again. Took me a while to figure that I didn't have to exit to main menu, which resets my vehicle setting, to actually return to vehicle settings. Also, for some reason recent racing games believe we need a story mode. And of course we're the prodigy pilot who's gonna bring an underdog to prominence. Dialogs are uninteresting, and they add nothing. Dear devs, of ervery racing game, please take note : racing games don't need a story, and if you're gonna make it half baked anyway, please kindly don't bother and give me a championship instead. I cannot recommend this game. I love their first game, but this one... It just doesn't cut it. The handling is horrible, the rest is just not great. Hard skip, or deep sale.