Super Woden: Rally Edge
Easy, right?
A few years ago, I played through Super Woden GP 2, a kind of top-down Gran Turismo style racing game. It had the same sort of progression through themed races, pushing you to buy and mod out new cars to match the event restrictions, and eventually earning enough payouts to advance into more high-powered challenges, but with a retro aesthetic and fixed perspective. It was an addictive and satisfying format, but the most fun I had with it were the dedicated rally events – the track stuff and especially circuit trials were either too tight or too dependent on getting past AI drivers, while the rally races were time trials only and had a lot more flexibility in how you could shave time along a more interesting route.
Rally Edge takes that better part of GP 2, devotes the entire game to it, and changes the fixed camera to a floating rear perspective, letting the developers go all in on winding, twisting hill climbs and mud runs. You still have the bumping music, [with a few new tracks] the simple controls and physics, and an accented digital voice calling out turns, but with more elevation changes, more weather effects, and more complex courses.
Races are broken up into letter groups, mostly by average horsepower, and every event has up to three stars to earn from podium placement, which then unlock more events. You get scaling cash payouts for finishes that you can spend on new cars, upgrades, and cosmetics, and rarely, even a free car as an award for first place. You don’t need to get first place in every event to move on, but it will help, especially when it comes time to move up a group and invest in a new car.
Most of the events, as you’d expect, are rallies, gunning a relatively light and agile car along a twisting, bouncy stretch of track, some of it paved, some of it packed dirt, occasionally washed with rain or covered in snow and slush. Corners come up hard, and you’re expected to take them as actively as you can, swinging your car’s ass around with the handbrake and shifting gears to drift into position for immediate acceleration. There are more bumps and hills than in the last game, more elevation in general, and some opportunities to get serious air time, for better and for worse, but always pretty cool.
Some of the tracks seem to be slightly tweaked revisits from GP 2, but they play a lot differently in Rally Edge even if I did recognize some landmarks and turns. The wholly new courses, or at least the ones I didn’t remember, are excellent, though. Japan’s narrow mountain pass roads, the Greek track that curves along a shore, a dense Scandinavian pine forest threaded through with a snow-packed trail, all of them have a different character and challenge to navigate. Each region has multiple courses, some of which you can also be sent along in the reverse direction.
Besides standard rally events, which are a series of time trials, there are also head to head events, where you and an opponent tackle a loop in parallel, and gymkhana showcases, short gimmick stages where you slalom through checkpoints or knock down chains of traffic cones in a parking lot. These don’t add a lot of variety, but they don’t get in the way either, and the gymkhana events in particular were a bit like little puzzles to solve, learning how to drive and spin around precisely enough to hit all the targets in time like the side missions in Smash Bros.
Finally, the game ends with two big events, the first being the return of the USA Hill Climb from the last game. This time it’s in two parts, uphill and downhill, a final test of the muscle and endurance of your unbound A class car. The second, and true challenge, is the World Rally Championship, a series of 12 courses across every country in the game [except USA] and locked to a group C car with under 400 HP. Just going back to such a relatively underpowered car after spending what is likely multiple hours in far more capable rides is one thing, but the length of the event all but requires you to pause, exit out to the menu, and change your oil out at least once, which is an ability you might not even know you have going into it.
That’s right, your oil degrades over time, alongside your car’s cleanliness, and at any point where you’re not actively racing, you can take a trip to the maintenance menu to refill those bars. For the most part, this is really just for flavor – you’re only going to notice real performance degradation if you completely ignore your oil, and changing it or washing the dirt off cost a mere pittance and just show you a little animation of the procedure. It’s a cute feature, but it makes me wish there were a little more going on with the maintenance angle, especially since rally racing is generally pretty rough on the cars in real life, and keeping the thing together or replacing failed parts is a major aspect of preparing for long events.
Another mechanic I wish was a little more fleshed out are the upgrades. Every car has a fixed series of augments you can buy, comprising multiple tiers of improved aftermarket parts for each system, from the engine and turbocharger, to the brakes and suspension. Many of these impact the car in the single most straightforward and quantifiable relevant metric – a boost to total horsepower output, and selecting them shows you up-front what your new max HP will be. The others, though, are more vague, and have zero quantification visible player-side. You just have to trust that the stopping power of these brakes you’re paying five grand for are… some amount more impressive than the stock pads, or that your premium tires will give you more grip on loose snow or rain-slicked pavement. How much grippier? You’ll have to rely on your gut there.
This is especially weird, because when you buy a car, each one has three meters, for Power, Top speed, and Grip, and each bar is just an unlabeled, vaguely color coded suggestion of quality. It seems like it should’ve been easy to, if nothing else, show you that bar, and how much more of that bar you’d get per relevant upgrade. I mean, I know these stats are held in some variable, somewhere in the game’s code… why can’t I get so much as a ballpark estimate?
The other problem with the upgrade system is that it feels like a completely arbitrary way of balancing cars – some get more upgrade tiers of one part or another, some can get enough extra horsepower to go over the HP limits of their class’s events, making them useless until you downgrade, and others feel like they’re bizarrely slim on possible progression. If there were more details, any kind of rationale given, or just a preview of how upgradable cars were on the dealer screens you buy them from, I wouldn’t find it such a frustrating system. The way it is, you might feel robbed when you drop several races’ worth of earnings on a whip that can’t even be invested in enough to be competitive, at least in terms of raw power.
Thankfully, raw power is only part of the story, and although it’s an extremely important part, you still need to drive well outside of full-throttle situations to come out on top. This is where Rally Edge shines, when you get over the initial unfamiliarity with each car, get a sense for its power, its torque, how angrily it can pull itself into place, and stop flopping all over like a fish out of water and start gliding like a figure skater. All racing games are really about this moment, the sublime connection you make as the proficient operator of a machine, your mind transformed temporarily into the nervous system of an alien body, the tires your feet, the engine your heart, the exhaust your breath.
Even at a distance, in this detached, mostly arcadey perspective, Super Woden, both GP 2 and Rally Edge, excel at evoking this. There’s an element of preparation, knowing the general layout of the course, keeping in the back of your mind roughly how many tight turns are coming, but memorization alone is not enough. You must downshift, touch the brakes, lose traction just long enough, power on, squealing and sputtering like a barely restrained beast, with not a conscious thought in your head. There’s not a lot of handholding in Super Woden, and virtually no specific guidance or training available, because how can you teach an automatic response through written instructions? You learn by playing, and the game ramps up elegantly alongside your horsepower.
The music and sound effects are almost perfect, the art style is vague but timeless, and the environments just detailed enough to pass as Earth-like locations without cluttering your view. Except in the forest stages where the camera does a frankly terrible job cutting through the branches. You can turn off the turn announcer if you want, practice specific tracks in the time trials, try out the arcade mode, or challenge the three weekly one-off races to put your best time on the global leaderboard. There’s even a full photo mode if you’re of an artistic bent.
But for all the great things I can say about Rally Edge, there are some significant weak points. Besides the upgrade system and the car selection being unbalanced, I was also a bit disappointed at how little distinction there was to the event criteria. Every event is limited only to a certain letter grade, which every car is assigned permanently, and then further restricted to a particular horsepower value, which only a few fully upgraded cars of each grade can even exceed, and doing so then makes them literally incapable of qualifying for any event. GP 2 was similar, but at least had more Gran Turismo style restrictions, like Touring Cup championships and one-offs you had to buy a van for. Sure, you may find that one car of the same grade does better in Japan while another edges it out on Kenya but the HP restriction on top of letter grade feels pointless and tacked on.
I also think the game lacks a bit of personality coming from GP 2, with every ‘race’ that’s not a head-to-head being a series of time trials completed in isolation, and even those head-to-heads taking you around on separate halves so you only rarely glimpse the other car, and so every other racer in the game is essentially just a name and time on a leaderboard, a high score you’re aiming for and a car make and model you barely glance at. Now, there wasn’t a whole lot of personality to GP 2, but you at least had to jockey for position in races, bump into other cars, and scream at them through your monitor when they boxed you in.
Finally, for a game that’s all about sliding around hairpin turns, cutting corners, and kicking up dirt, Rally Edge is woefully inconsistent about where you’re allowed to cut corners. Many 180s have barricades of varying inflexibility lining their inner edge, slowing you down, clipping your bumper and spinning you around, or stopping you outright if you try to take the curve a little too short, but at least they’re visible. Some other turns, and even some bits of shoulder you’re not necessarily cutting intentionally but might drift into, are occupied by little sprite cutouts of spectators, and so much as grazing one of these causes the virtual audience to emit a little ‘aww’ and your car gets faded out and placed back on the center of the track at a dead standstill the same way you do after a manual reset.
This is annoying, but is also a real aspect of rally racing, with spectators putting their lives, the drivers’ lives, and everyone around them at risk just to look at a car barreling towards them only nominally under control. I just wish the little sprites could run away like the guys in Assetto Corsa Rally do. Or that they weren’t SO close so often. Or that they weren’t sometimes partially phased through a rigid barricade that you should be able to clip without getting reset.
But even if there are no spectators, even if there are no physical barriers, if you go too far off the track, you will get faded out and plopped back down as if dropped by Lakitu, and there’s no visible indication of where that line is. Sometimes it’ll happen as you struggle to regain control after an awkward jump, sometimes you’ll cut a corner but just a bit deeper than the game arbitrarily decides to allow, sometimes you’ll do something that looks perfectly legit and the game will just grab you by the ear and drag you away as you watch your lead evaporate and there’s not much you can do about it.
All my little disappointments with Super Woden: Rally Edge aside, I had a fantastic time going through the campaign. I think if you enjoy arcade style racing games, the Super Woden series are well worth your time. They’re not the most grounded or granular, you have to do a bit of manual file replacement to give cars real-world, recognizable names, and Rally Edge in particular is not going to pull you in if you don’t like drifting around corners a lot, but they feel like authentically straightforward retro titles, the kind of thing that you’d dig out once a year for a ritual playthrough. If you like old school racing games, and you like rally racing, well, you’re an adult, I can’t tell you what to do. Quit bothering me.
Super Woden: Rally Edge can be purchased on Steam.