You’re waiting at the line for the lights to change. You see heavy rain slanting left, meaning a heavy wind which will affect your cornering, and make the road more slippery. The light turns to green, and you speed off, hoping to get a good first section time with a clean start. After a few corners you realise that the person constantly jabbering into your ear isn’t your co-driver Nicky Grist, but your traumatised wife, and you’re actually driving through the country roads of Dorset… Whoops. Colin McRae Rally is back to take over your life, with a shiny new 2005 coat of paint, and isn’t she a beauty…
First off, I think it needs to be said that this game looks just lovely. Whoever thinks that the PS2 can’t produce impressive visuals anymore needs to be dragged out into the street and shot. The cars are all intricately modelled, and it pains you to tear beautiful chunks from them in-game - even though they look even better with the windows smashed out, mud on the wheel arches and up the back, with one wheel running on metal… As for the courses, they also look great. Although the far-off backgrounds aren’t up to much, the feeling of depth and distance is better than ever before and the detail both on the road and at the roadside is a testament to how much attention to detail has been spent.
The main bulk of the game comes in the Career mode, which starts you off as a lowly semi-pro rally driver, and lets you work your way up the ranks. You start off with just a couple of cars to begin with, but as you win trophies and tournaments, you unlock not only new ones, but also possible upgrades for the motors you’ve got, and skill points which let you compete in harder events. This method really makes you spend hours and hours slugging through every inch of the career mode in order to unlock everything, and with the new handling CMR2005’s got under it’s bonnet, slugging has never been more fun.
The cars now handle with realistic weight, meaning you can slide the back end out (with the aid of a manoeuvre apparently called the “Scandinavian flick”) with more precision than before. This also leads to a few teething problems until you get used to it - you’ll be fighting to keep the car’s ass on the track, because Codies have cunningly stacked obstacle upon obstacle at the roadside to make sure you stay in line. Every car in the game handles differently, not just in speed and ease of turning, but in loads of other things, so it doesn’t feel like you’re always driving the same bodyshell with a different paint job, as is the case with certain other driving games. Combine this with the devilishly challenging track design, and you’re onto a lot of fun here.
You can also drive as the legendary Colin McRae himself in Championship mode, using whatever car you want, and taking on the champions. This isn’t advised for beginners, as the cars are pants-wettingly fast (always keeping steady at 60fps), and your brain struggles to catch up with what it’s being shown until you crash out and slow down - and you will crash, oh yes. This mode is much more about damage control, and making sure you’ve got the right suspension level and tyre type to ensure victory. This mode’s for the wannabe McRae’s out there, who know their pea gravels from their light gravels, but anyone else is going to find it pretty damn tough to stay in the competition.
Driving through the stages and getting through the other side relatively unharmed is a very tough task, believe me. It takes all of your concentration to get the timing for slides right, as sliding a foot off line and clipping a wall or a tree can cost you vital seconds. And you’d better listen to our Welsh pal Nicky Grist, because if you miss a direction, you’ll end up ploughing into a bunch of trees, or going down the completely wrong road – 2005 has some truly realistic looking stages with plenty of junctions that try and mislead you. Challenging as it is, I keep finding myself negotiating the frighteningly fast, wood-lined and winding stages of Norway, with about 5 metres visibility ahead due to heavy rain (and I mean heavy) in the early hours of the morning, totally addicted, trying to shave seconds off my best time. And who said games were too easy these days?
But alas, the game isn’t completely flawless, it also has its obligatory “niggles”. When racing through some stages, in particular the Greece and Australia stages, you occasionally run into some invisible barriers running along the track itself. This barrier sometimes stops you taking wider corners, or recovering from oversteer by going off the track for a while. This could be some form of bug, or something Codies stuck in to subtly make sure the “lesser players” could stay on the track. Either way, it’s not big, and it’s not clever, it’s annoyingly restrictive and does tarnish the game’s otherwise fun handling. As for going off the track, on other rival rally games (World Rally Championship for example) you have a button to reset yourself back on the course if you happen to go off track too far, or flip over. CMR2005 senses this automatically, and will obviously do the opposite to what you want - when you go off the track a little, and try to get back on by joining at the next bend, or going through the trees, maybe saving you time, it just resets you, even though you might be heading back towards the track. But when you’ve gone over the side of a corner with a steep bank, and you can’t get up, it just lets you try and get out yourself, which in certain spots is next to impossible and several times cost me the lead in a rally. It’s only a small point, and granted it didn’t occur that often, it’s just one of those things that happens at exactly the moment you didn’t want it to.
As for the game’s online mode, it doesn’t really live up to the high quality McRae Sheen that the rest of the game has. Yes, you get to race head-to-head against other players online, so that’s pretty good. The problems begin when instead of racing other cars, or at least things that look like cars, you race other players in the shape of ghost cars (a red outline of a car), so that you can’t hit each other. Couple this with a severe lack of anyone talking to each other, probably because they’re too busy trying not to bounce off the trees, and you get the feeling of racing against a silent computer again – the same as with F1 ‘04. This is all if you can find a room that’s actually set up, and has people in it, of course, which is also hard to do… But of course, as with (nearly) every online game, find a room with some good people who chat, and are about the same level as you, and it’s a good laugh, which is always what online gaming is about.
Colin McRae Rally 2005 is the best rally game I’ve played in a long time. The handling just feels oh-so right, and the cars look stunning. There’s enough to keep you busy here for a while thanks to the new career mode, and after you’ve gone through the offline modes, there’s also the online mode to try out, which extends the lifespan even more. Despite a couple of flaws and a strange lack of reset button, this game is worth selling your mother for. If you didn’t sell her to buy last year’s version, that is…
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