Review: Rally Point 2: Extreme

Rally Point Extreme is a new flash game by Spil Games whom you won’t have heard of but they are a Dutch company who are the biggest casual game company in the world.

You know all those flash games that people forward you the links for in emails? Yeah, they are Spil Games games.

So why am I reviewing a flash game? Flash games are ten a penny except you don’t even pay the penny so they are essentially free and infinite and can be treated like air and Alan Sugar insults. Flash games exist because they are cheap to make, free to play, fun, and you don’t need a powerful computer to play them. Also, Minesweeper, Solitaire and Reversi get a bit boring after playing them 702 times a day. The sites that host the flash game get lots of eyeball real estate and thus earn ad revenue for games that were invented years ago and so all they have to do is copy the code, make a few changes in the game assets and bingo, money.

The reason why this game is being reviewed is that you can play it three dimensions. Yes, three. Not wearing glasses with projectiles aiming for your eyeballs 3D, but normal game 3D. This is the first proper 3D game from Spil Games. How? Well the game is programmed in the recently released Flash 11 which “heralds the new dawn of 3D speedy browser based gaming.” According to Adobe, Flash 11 brings in “highly accelerated graphics support to the platform.” and “the new Stage3D technology in the new Flash Player brings combined 2D and 3D acceleration that is up to 1,000 times faster than the previous Flash iterations.” Prior to Flash 11, 3D Flash games played like watching a flipbook cartoon in slow motion with all of the odd pages removed and half of the even pages covered in ink.

Rally Point 2: Extreme is a rally arcade game and a sequel to a game that Spil Games released at the start of 2011 called Rally Point which was a Shockwave-built racer which – shockingly – has been played more than 34 million times since it was released. That is a lot of productive time that has been quixotically misplaced. The game’s DNA is in games like Outrun and Lotus Turbo Challenge but it is in fact a lot closer to the earlier iterations of the Colin McRae rally games. It is tempting to believe that the developer found the first Colin McRae game in a charity shop or on eBay, played it, and then their line manager came in and says “what are you doing? Hang on, that looks great. Create that so it works on a website”.

The game load time is initially negligible although when you load up a track it takes about 45 seconds to a minute to spool up. You can initially choose one of three cars to take for a spin, a Mini clone, an Impreza clone, and possibly an Evo clone. They all handle exactly the same way however but have different nifty animations. When you get a decent time on a track then this unlocks another track and you start with three unlocked tracks. Controls were arrow keys plus shift for getting the back end out and it felt very digital, as I am used to driving car games with an analogue wheel however I got used to the controls fairly rapidly.

The game is pretty quick and the refresh rate was quite high. Not 60FPS, but certainly acceptable. The backdrops to the tracks were inoffensive although when I paused the game they didn’t really stand up to sustained scrutiny. The tracks were ultimately a bit bland but it didn’t really matter because the game is fun and fast. If you would have shown me this game 10 years ago I would assume it was a normal PC game. Granted, a cheap PC game that might have come free with a VGA cable but still decent enough to warrant paying money separately for.

The criticisms I had were the music, an awful repetitive plinky planky guitar dirge that made me search for the cotton wool for my ears and sleeping mask for my eyes in case I somehow learnt how to interpret musical vibrations in my cup of coffee on my desk next to the monitor.

The other criticism is that it feels a bit lonely on the tracks. I know that is meant to be the point of real life rallies in particular, but this is a game isn’t it? To somewhat mitigate this, if you log in to play the game (which you don’t have to, by the way) then you can access the leader boards and compare your lap time with other work-dodging, flash game-playing reprobates.

So the game is diverting, free, not Gran Turismo 5, free, and available for nothing. It’s simple, unpretentious arcade fun so what are you waiting for?