Exo Rally Championship
Highway to the danger zone
You begin Exo Rally Championship as a freshly signed member of Lindsay Racing Team, just earning your UTV license and enrolling in the beginner series for an interstellar rally league. Lindsay is an underdog, its glory days long behind, and you’re their last hope for the podium. The only problem is how you’re going to survive that long.
Progress through the game involves completing the major ‘events,’ each one in turn unlocking the trials to earn a license for the next event’s vehicle type. Every event is staged across a number of different planets, with several races on each. The planets vary wildly in surface features and even gravity – New Earth is a partially terraformed temperate world dotted with trees and crossed with streams, while Dhool, almost the poster world for the game, is a barren hellscape of dusty craters, frozen ditches, and the occasional bombardment of high-velocity micrometeors. You even get to visit the Earth’s Moon, and show those limp wristed astronauts from the 70s how it’s really done.
Every stage is composed of a series of checkpoints spread across some chunk of the landscape, and there’s absolutely nothing on any of them that can remotely be categorized as a road, or even a trail. It’s all pure overland navigation, and the checkpoints are generally open-ended so as to allow for some wide passes. In fact, many of them are simply apex markers, points with a line coming out that extends forever, and as long as you cross that line ANYWHERE after the prior checkpoint, you can move on. Others are round-abouts, forcing you to complete a full 360 around a post, and a few are conventional gates.
The reason the checkpoint situation and the lack of designated paths is so important is that the game does not give you the sort of guidance typical of racing, or even rally games. There is no recommended line, there are no callouts for braking or upcoming hazards. Instead, before every race, you have the opportunity to take control of the little quadcopter drone docked on your vehicle, and fly around plotting your own course. You can paint your own line on the ground, scope out a gnarly field of boulders, an icy lake, an easy pass between two hills, think about how fast you’ll want to approach a turn, and leave yourself your own indicators for hazards, dropoffs, and brake points, all of which then show up projected in your HUD. When you’re in a race, you can see the green gate of the next checkpoint on the horizon no matter what, but whether you can make it there in good time is all down to your own scouting.
The scouting is even more important than just trying to make the best time, too, because ERC also features pretty detailed and extremely punishing damage modeling. Hard landings can fuck up your suspension, bend your wheels, pop a tire, or worse. Sliding into a rock can leave your cockpit cracked, leaking O2 and putting you on a very strict timer to cross the finish line and get back on life support. Some planets are coated in invasive nano-dust that coats your brakes, jams your thrusters, and can harm your engine or cause disorientating electronics glitches mid-race. Even your scouting drone is modeled as a real, physical object, and if you slam into the ground or clip a piece of bizarre alien wreckage while trying to draw out your route, you’ll be stuck trying to drive the courses sight unseen until the next refit.
Speaking of, after about 2-3 races back to back, you’ll be picked up by your support ship and given the opportunity to perform any repairs and maintenance you need. Repairs and deep cleaning take time, drawn from a 30 minute limit. You are allowed to exceed that if you really need to, but the excess time is directly added as a penalty to the next race, so if you really took a hit last stage, it might be worth skipping the next round entirely. You can even opt to leave some repairs half done, or not fixed at all, if you think you can still race with a bum spring or damaged engine. Maintenance stages also allow you to refill your RCS fuel and swap out your tires, which is a major part of the planning for each event. You get to see the course overviews for the whole planet up front, and each even has a readout of the estimated distances you’ll have to drive across each surface type to reach every point. You can use that to decide what tires you want to use – hard offroaders for long, rough stretches, soft slicks for sticking to solid rock, or even paddled tires for clawing your way through sand and thick dust. But no course will ever be entirely one type, and you won’t get a chance to swap out until you’re picked up by your ship again, so it’s always a compromise.
The last thing you have to keep in mind at all times is your RCS. Each vehicle you unlock, along with their increasing sportiness in other areas, also has more RCS thrusters at their corners, giving them more options in additional control. The UTVs can fire one side at a time, tilting or pitching themselves in mid-air with the right control stick to correct an awkward jump or attack a slope more aggressively. The EX04 gains the ability to fire all four simultaneously, pushing yourself down into the ground for more traction or to ignore rough terrain, or pushing yourself up, over rocks, across gaps, cushioning your impact from a massive jump. Finally, the EX06 further allows you to add RCS ‘boost’ to all your other actions – spinning yourself around on turns, using reverse thrust to amplify your brakes, and slamming on afterburners for that last bit of speed.
Your RCS is limited by two things – heat and fuel. Your fuel tanks can be filled with no time cost at any maintenance cycle, and while it does add weight, it’s always worth topping off. RCS fuel is one of the main things you’ll be constantly mentally calculating during a race – if you’ve got two or more races back-to-back, you really don’t want to leave yourself trying to go fast without some emergency gas, so that half-empty warning can itself feel just as dire as a ‘fuel level critical’ later on. But it’s so useful that you also want to use every drop you can to try to translate it into more grip, more power, more agility, keeping just enough to bail you out when you realize you’re airborne looking the wrong way. Heat buildup, meanwhile, forces you to use the thrusters tactically, or risk losing access as they cool down from dangerous levels. Heat dissipation even differs depending on planetary atmosphere – some planets are naturally very hot, and the Moon doesn’t even have any air to leech your heat away.
And when I say you have to keep these things in mind at all times, I mean it. Every single race, from the simple jaunty loop to the grueling multi-kilometer trek, has the potential to go badly enough to threaten your standings in the event, every rock you didn’t account for while scouting could take out a tire, every mistake could end your life. Even if you do a thorough job scouting, sometimes you’ll slide a bit out of place, start to roll and need to correct, and then realize your line doesn’t look so good anymore, and you’ll have to adapt on the fly. Other times you’ll come to a gap between hazards or a hairpin that looked nasty from your drone and think “actually I can make that. Watch this shit.” Or maybe a fucking METEOR is about to land right on your plotted course. You’ll find yourself harshly second guessing your own planning and judgement – did you really think I could drive UP a frozen river you idiot?
You have to make real decisions from the moment you line up at the starting gate until you cross the finish line. Do I go full bore at the end, risk rolling off the cliff beyond, or ease up, get ready to stop safely as soon as my time is locked in… how much damage am I willing to take and how steep did that look from the drone? How many seconds ahead am I and did I lose too much time getting over here? If I use RCS now will I have enough for next stage? What even is the next stage?? Oh fuck! Oh God! I can’t… no… YES. SEND IT.
The final event puts you in the EX06, and pits you against all five planets… or all four planets and the Moon, in a genuinely grueling gauntlet. Jumping over volcanoes, sliding down icy slopes, spinning uncontrollably in 1/6ths Earth gravity, and then you have to do Tensei’s hill climb. Instead of the standard series of individual races, Tensei in the Championship is just a single epic route, running along the shore and then up and up and up until you reach the top of a mountain. The game gave me ten minutes to do the drone scouting, and I used almost every bit of it and didn’t even do a good job. I kept pausing and tilting the camera up to confirm that, yes, there was still more mountain to scout.
Now with all my gushing praise for how thrilling the game is, how it does an unprecedented job adapting Dakar style rally, it’s still not quite perfect. I think the biggest problem really comes down to balance – the game is pretty easy on the default Professional setting, and though the game has a percentage-based sliding difficulty slider and separate toggles for multiple mechanics, it’s all a bit fussy and underwhelming. For one thing, the slider is described as adjusting the ‘AI difficulty’ incrementally, but since every single event in the game is a staggered rally, you’re not actually encountering or even seeing other racers do… anything. All it actually changes are the final times of the top of the pack, without you being able to even tell how the other drivers are supposedly scoring these lap times.
Furthermore, though you can toggle the other options on and off at will, including more aggressive damage modeling and tighter drone scouting limits, by default they all tick on when you set the AI slider up high enough, and as far as I could tell, those new drags on your ability to plan and go all out don’t actually affect the other drivers when enabled, so it just means you take more damage from minor mistakes and THEN are asked to drive even better than an invisible lap-setter.
The last toggle that the difficulty adjustment includes is removing your ability to freely re-attempt a race at any time, and that should be the sort of option that really makes a game like this come alive, forcing you to deal with the consequences of your actions, suck it up when you need to swap out a busted tire while your lead evaporates, admit defeat if you die driving dangerously. Unfortunately, this leads into my other, otherwise much smaller complaint, which is that the game is absolutely a little inconsistent feeling. A lot of negative reviews of the game hinge on people’s irritation that driving a six-wheeled space buggy on an alien world doesn’t work or feel like driving a hatchback up a hill on Earth does, but there’s a seed of truth in the frustration because occasionally it does feel like the physics modeling isn’t totally doing its job.
You’ll sometimes get launched onto your back by a tiny bump, sometimes your thrusters will straighten you out as if you’re reaching into the screen and twisting your car with your hand, and other times you’ll be blasting smoke and it doesn’t seem to counteract whatever force you’re fighting. There was one spot right in front of the starting gate on a race deep in the Championship where it would just… point me 90 degrees the wrong way if I did anything but putter over it slowly, and I couldn’t tell visibly if there was even a material difference there. The Moon is especially brutal, handling totally unlike anything else, giving you almost no leeway for screwups, and with AI times that on some stages feel unbelievable. Dealing with all of that, all those little moments where something goes sideways and you have no way of telling what even caused it, in a true ironman mode, feels like a recipe for nightmares.
I’ve got a few other little quibbles with the game too. The replay feature is cool, and it works with the photo mode to let you get some really great shots, but the camera options are all boring or bad. Some of the distance cams seem to have trouble actually lining up with your vehicle or putting you in frame at all, and if you leave the auto cycle on you’ll find yourself just looking at a pair of tire tracks or, like, the side of a hill more than is really tolerable. The grating thing is that it seems obvious that you should be able to control a tracking drone in the replays, spinning around, positioning yourself to capture a sick jump, and so on – the controls are all there, and it’s not even a problem with the engine, because changing camera views has a visible transition where you can see the game camera zoom over to where the next in-universe camera is supposed to be.
It’s also unfortunate that, despite the voiced characters all doing a good job and there being a mildly interesting story about the fate of the last star of Lindsay Racing teased, there’s not actually anything to the campaign besides getting on the podium. You don’t have to manage costs, your teammates are non-entities to the point where half the pre-race comments you get from the team Principal Ed are basically shitting on them, the standardized vehicles mean there’s no customization aside from the [admittedly very detailed and thorough] tuning menu. There’s a tiny bit of personality to the other racing teams, who all have a vibrant and characterful theme and Team Principal portrait, but the other racers, aside from the handful who actually get custom portraits because they win occasionally, are completely interchangeable blank default helmets. This isn’t really the sort of game to have a bunch of drama or extra management bloat piled on, but it does feel like there are plenty of opportunities to give the world a little more flair that the developers skipped or never got around to.
The last little thing I’d definitely change if I could are some of the graphical ‘effects’ like the way the whole whole camera glitches around certain alien [?] structures or from dust interference. It doesn’t really make much sense, and it’s just an annoying thing that pops up while you’re trying to drive.
Once you’ve earned all your licenses, and succeeded in conquering the Championship itself, there’s thankfully more to do than just trying again at arbitrarily higher difficulty. Every planet has an individual event you can go for, there are daily and weekly challenge races with global leaderboards, an extra series where you drive a giant 6 wheeled dump truck with no RCS, there’s even a proper Stage Builder and you can set up custom multiplayer events with your own stages, or randomly generated ones. There’s a ton of settings too – you can make multi-vehicle events, define the number of spare tire sets entrants can pick, or even adjust the intensity of meteor showers on Dhool. It’s neat stuff, and the only problem is that, like every racing game of this type, you’re just doing it all in isolation anyway, so it hardly feels like a multiplayer experience, more like a custom leaderboard. Even Mario Maker has more multiplayer visibility with the death markers that pop up. Maybe ERC could let you enable ‘bones’ files where there’s bits of debris and battered, abandoned vehicles that populate the map where people wreck.
Exo Rally Championship is a must-play for anyone who likes racing games, and maybe even worth trying if you merely tolerate racing. Its free-form courses make it unlike anything I’ve ever played in the genre, the RCS system gives you enough extra control to encourage you to push your limits, and the design of the different planets is grounded enough to not feel silly but distinct and spectacular enough to get really intense. There are definitely one or two changes I’d like to see but they’re not enough to spoil an outstanding experience.
Exo Rally Championship can be purchased on Steam.