V rally expert edition

There are 26 cars in Championship Edition and 27 in Expert Edition. There are over 80 original tracks which represent all of the rallies of the season, excluding Greece and Safari. The game modes include a time trial mode, an arcade mode which follows the traditional style of arcade games, V-Rally Trophy where the player completes against 3 AI opponents to see who can get the least time in all of the rallies.

The championship mode follows the actual example of rallying with different stages in the rallies featured in the game. Weather conditions like snow, rain, and rallying in daytime, sunset and night are included.

The racing tracks are essentially stored as curved lines in 3D space. The second is likely to follow suit. But it's not a bad game and we've actually got a bit of a soft spot for the V-Rally franchise. However, put this up against thoroughbreds such as Rally Championship or Colin McRae which is on budget and things donl look quite so hot. The graphics are passable - although pop-up is still visible on certain tracks - and there are some nice touches, including visible headlights and spectators running for cover as you scream around a corner.

The different surfaces work reasonably well, if a tad exaggerated, with snow-covered tracks turning into the art of timing your slide to your codriver's instructions and the respective coloured arrows that pop up at the top of the screen. To get through the first set of tracks all you need to do is concentrate on the horizon and tap the left and right directions regularly to keep righting yourself.

Occasional use of the handbrake and brake can shave seconds off your lap times, but quite often it's just as easy to slam into a bank and accelerate oft. Things get harder later on - the barked instructions are non-stop and the comers as treacherous as anything the Belgian Grand Prix could throw at you in the rain! Different play modes include Standard Time Trial, Arcade, Trophy and Championship, and to progress and open up the theoretical maximum of 80 circuits and 26 cars you have to work your way through sets of tracks, with your cumulative time for the lot taken as your finishing position.

This means you can't relax even you're way out in front. There's no option to race online against others, as usual. It features stages from 12 countries from around the world, stretching the globe from Finland to Argentina to New Zealand. It lets you drive 26 cars, including 1.

It boasts 80 different stages. It has a track editor that lets you create your own which you can then upload onto the V-Rally Online service.

It even adopts a Rally Masters approach in that it offers looped circuits and special stages, and lets you compete against other cars at the same time if you want to. On paper, this seems like one hell of a rally game. As you may have figured by now, it isn't, but that's not to say that it's entirely without merit. V-Rally 2 features the most amazing frame rate of any racing game I've ever seen, including Rally Masters - the feeling of speed you get from this title is almost frightening.

In contrast, the graphics themselves are not particularly special. Whilst there's plenty of variety to the scenery, and each country has its own distinct theme, the last year has seen the standard for rally game graphics raised very high. In addition the in-game resolution is restricted to x which makes it all look very pixelated, and in this day and age of high powered 3D accelerators, this is plain unacceptable.

But the speed at which it all moves is could almost have been enough to compensate for these shortcomings, if only there was something solid beneath the surface.

Sadly the actual gameplay is very simple, and this is reflected in the way the controls work. Playing this with a steering wheel is impossible, as the game seems to treat all steering input as either full-left or full-right, with very little in between.

This was not a game for my Microsoft Force Feedback Steering Wheel , where my initial attempts to steer the sodding car resulted in plenty of pointless shuddering force feedback, and more importantly, violent sideways swerving for the best part of a mile before I simply gave up.

You can tell this was originally a console game, as it is designed primarily with the joypad in mind oh, and you can't use a mouse on the menus - another hallmark , although it works just as well with a keyboard. Furthermore, in what strikes me as a major retrograde step back to the days of Europress's Network Q RAC Rally , using the brake button is an option rather than a necessity. Most of the stages are comfortably flat, and in the few where you'll come across hairpins, you'll find that ramming the banks or invisible barriers on the outside of the turn will often get you through just as quickly.

Still, this is a game aimed at giving you a quick rush rather than any long term satisfaction, and to this end the design is fairly streamlined. Your mad antics are accompanied by a suitably hard rock soundtrack which will either put you in the mood or drive you nuts. Crashes result in your car being instantly put upright, and this helps to keep the flow of the game going.

It's a good thing too, as you'll find yourself upside down quite a lot in the night and rain stages where it's very difficult to make out where you are going.

In fact the night stages are ridiculously dark, and end up getting very frustrating regardless. Equally annoying are the co-drivers. It's hard to make out what the female one is saying, and in any case they're not particularly accurate a "bad right" instruction can be translated as "watch out for a sort-of nasty bend within the next two to four corners, maybe".

But then, given the very nature of the game, it doesn't matter very much when you're able to crash at every corner and still go faster than the AI cars.