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View Full Version : Rally Fusion



steveo_wrx
11-18-2002, 03:33 PM
Activision drops a deuce. This game is a steaming POS. Pure arcade, boring arcade at that. With WRC, VRally3, Rallisport Challenge available and McRae 3.0 waiting in the wings, why even publish a title like this ?

The premise is you enter rally championships of increasingly challenging difficulty, Groups C,B,A respectively. Before that, there's a few license tests to unlock the championships. In the first one, you get a Rav4 (!) to complete some hokey stage in the desert. Then the next, you compete against Jan Magnussen (or was it Tom Christiansen ?, I forget - uh, what do ALMS drivers have to do with rallying ?) on some silly obstacle course. I hit a bridge abutment, came to a dead stop and still whipped his butt by 5 seconds. And so on.

Okay, I've unlocked Group C. Woohoo, I get to choose between the Rav4 or some dune buggy (all the other vehicles are still locked). The first stage is a repeat of that goofy desert thing. My co-driver becomes a deaf mute for some reason, but that's okay because all he could do before was announce the corners late or shout "You're off course !" Did that make a difference ? Heck no, you just whip across acres of billiard table-smooth, bare terrain to get back on track. Occasionally the course is marked by something that looks like road flares and fireworks shooting up from nowhere. Or you drive through inflatable km marker balloons stolen from the Tour de France bike race. Do these trigger a display your time status for the stage ala WRC ? Of course not.

Pretty graphics and the controls are decent but way too easy. Oh, and all the cars sound and handle the same. Your progress is tracked by an obnoxious game show caliber announcer shouting things like, "YOU'VE CAUGHT BIG AIR !!!" or "YOU'VE HAD A BIG CRASH !!!". At the end of the stage, you drive into some ludicrous stadium in the middle of nowhere which resembles half of Skakespeare's Globe theater. There you see an animation of your car whipping under the banner and braking from 100-0 in twenty feet.

I could go on, but you get the idea. This game is available to pollute either the Xbox or the PS2.
:( :(