CarX Rally VR Review
The quest has precious few racing games. Of the games offered, they mostly fall on the arcade side of the genre. This one, however, is one for us. This feels like I'm in control of an actual car I. You need skill and for real braking to make a decent run at a good stage time.
These vehicles have weight and momentum that will factor into how you get around the varies rallies. You can see and feel the weight transfer, and intuitively maneuver the car around the corner. Of course, I've spent my fair amount of time in the grass trying to carry a little too much momentum through a turn. Using the stick to control the car feels like you are making small adjustments and tweaks to the momentum of the car. CarX as a company has provided us with great drift physics before, they have brought this expertise to the Quest as well.
There is no hand tracked steering. Placing your virtual hands on the wheel to turn it is a favorite method for many quest racing fans that was left out. The handbrake never felt like I got it right. I depended more on early braking and the Scandinavian flick.
Graphics are fine. Not great, but not bad enough that they are a distraction while playing the game. There are more than a few racing games on quest I couldn't say that about. The frame rate is solid and I never saw a studder. This game is doing pretty good considering the hardware it's limited to.
The courses are sadly too short for my liking. 3km is a pretty quick outing with the car. Starting out there were a lot of 30 -60 second races. Later on I was able to do 6k stages. Still not long enough for my liking, but I do suppose it fits with the spirit of pick up and playness of the quest.
There is little investment in any single stage. It tends to kill the spirit of rally. When a restart means replaying 2 minutes to get a better run, there is little incentive to just roll with a bad run and hope you win the championship overall. That being said, you have to really mess up to not get first. 1st place should not simply be a reward for participating.
There is an upgrade path for all the cars. It's pretty basic, but delivers noticable improvements. Changing your class of car is also a noticable improvement. You can rest easy knowing your gameplay will change as you progress instead of just the look of the car.
The repairing of your car is weird. Damage carries over across rallies, not just stages if you fail to do repairs. You have the typical repair time limits, but will be faced with a real-time 5 minute countdown to wait for the repairs to be done. You can spend tickets you earned to bypass this wait. Surely a hold over from it's mobile game roots. I never ran out of tickets, but I didn't repair too often either. There is visible and practical damage present, but you really have to beat your car up to be slowed down.
Multiplayer has a 'coming soon' banner over it. The window is gone, we all know how this is gonna go. It's a niche game. If you coordinate with a group to all join at a certain time, more power to you. The rest of us will most likely be waiting to join a game that's never going to populate.
The 1st person view is great with a decently detailed dash. I do rather enjoy looking over to see my Co-driver intently studying his scribbling of course notes. You also get bumper and hood cam to give you a fuller view of the road and a better sense of speed. There are apparently 2 3rd person cams, but they both look the same to me. It's good for getting a better view of how the entire car is move and where/when the weight is being shifted. Really great to see they included every view you'd normally want.
It's got day, night, evening, and morning times. Rain and snow as well. Gravel, tarmac, and ice/snow packed roads. Nice variety to mix things up throughout the championships.
Over all, I'd say this is the best racer we have on the system. I love rally and skew toward sim rather than arcade racers. If mario kart is your thing, there may be a better racer. For the rest of us, this is very nearly the best we could hope for given the hardware.
