Rally Championship Xtreme

The game is particularly good fun once you have unlocked the classic cars, they handle a whole lot differently to everything else. In fact all the cars handle a lot more differently which again is an advantage over CMR games.

It will run very well on medium powered systems and of course runs amazingly on 3ghz +

Be sure to patch the game to the latest version to avoid any crashes in the menus.

The courses are ridiculously configured, many of the hazards are hidden in too-deep shadow and many of the routes are indecipherable. The night-time sections are jokes, given that any brush against any object nearly always puts out your lights and makes further progress impossible.

The dynamics of the vehicles are laughable with impossibly unstable steering, with suspensions that do anything but keep the wheels in contact with the ground, and with a number of the cars (including FWD and 4WD vehicles) displaying a dogged determination to have the back wheels overtaking the front wheels. Maybe they put the wrong car images into the game... perhaps they meant to put in racing tractors with bouncey coil springs on grossly over-sized tyres and with little wings sprouting from the sides, because that's what the cars feel like to drive. They spend so much time bouncing about in the air for no apparent reason that I feel the game could be rebilled as Aerocar and controlled through a joystick.

As for the gameplay itself, the game is unnecessarily restrictive about what cars it will let you drive, where and when. There is no opportunity to drive the courses under different lighting or weather conditions than those given. Even on a 2GHz machine, there were several occasions when control lag was evident, making steering (in particular) a very hazardous task. The default keyboard assignations are ill-considered and the game's menu systems are incredibly clumsily structured.

This could have been such a good game because it has so many good things going for it. But its drivability and usability, which should have been hammered into shape during Beta-testing, are virtually non-existent.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it's a shift from the focus of the previous Rally Championship games. Stages now only take a few minutes and are somewhat less than authentic - in the first stage there's a ramp that lets you take a flying shortcut. I'm not sure that kind of thing appears in real rallies... In the second (Manx) rally, the first stage starts out in a rather confusing dockyard.

Again, this is a decent game, as long as what you're looking for is a fun PC driver that's not too taxing.

What a different experience, when I come to use it on my PC. All because the MS FF Wheel I use wont set up properly. End product, throttle stays on full and the brakes dont work at all. Not the best way to drive a car! Not a real problem I thought, contact the support site on the web. This just gives you a phone number.

Still not to be put off so easily, I rang them. They informed me that the developers were aware of the problem which is affecting "hundreds" of people, but sadly they were all on holiday. What??

This is a typically poor support scenario which spoils what should be a great product. Worth thinking about when looking at this title. Come on Actualize, Warthog and EA - sort it out.

Great graphics and good physics which is what matters. The game starts you with the lower powered 2 wheel drive cars meaning you have to race your way up to get the more powerful machinery keeping me racing well into the night