Art of Rally: Australia DLC PC Review – Yeah Righto!

With the rush of playing EA SPORTS WRC recently, another rally game has received a new DLC with Australian tracks, and that game is Art of Rally by Funselektor Labs. This is an isometric rally racing game that originally released in 2020 on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and has had a heap of free content added to it since then. Now the first premium paid DLC has launched and it’s in our very own backyard with Art of Rally: Australia.

Art of Rally is an arcade-style rally game with low-poly graphics and vibrant colours that focuses on speed and your control of vehicles. Depending on the car I chose, I struggled a lot trying to stay on the track on corners. We can use and unlock a large variety of rally cars from late 1960s, 70s, 80s, Group B, S, and A, all in low-poly versions of their former glory days. I tended to use a car called ‘the esky’ as it looked kinda like an esky, but more because I can control it with the most precision compared to others. The career mode has you racing through challenging stages inspired by real-world locations and doing blocks of events based on the historic years of rally racing origins.

Group 2 is set in the years 1967-1971, and cars have appropriate control mechanisms meaning they don’t handle near as well as more modern variants. The game’s controls are easy to learn but difficult to master and you can easily find yourself flying over an edge of smashing into trees while copping 5 second time penalties as you are reset back onto the track. In total there are 78 rally stages set in Finland, Sardinia, Norway, Japan, Germany, Kenya and Indonesia. I loved racing the Japanese stages with the cherry blossoms zooming past.

Gameplay is in a traditional rally sense so you race along and have track progress meter on the left. You don’t have a co-driver calling the turns and so you need to see them coming and anticipate the balance of speed, braking and turning. It’s one thing I struggled with at release and still to this day because of the isometric view, I haven’t mastered the feel of elevation and sloping into some of the turns. There are a variety of game modes in Art of Rally including the career mode, a time attack mode, custom rally mode, and online events.

The time attack mode is a more focused mode where players try to set the best times on individual stages. Online events allow players to compete against each other in daily and weekly challenges. Custom rally mode allows players to create their own rally events with their own settings and this is where the Australia DLC comes into play. Activating the DLC adds 6 new rally stages, 4 new cars, 2 new music tracks, and a new free roam area.

The new rally stages are set in the Australian outback and with tracks featuring a mix of dirt, gravel, and asphalt. The stages are also more open and flowing than the stages in the base game, which allows for higher speeds and more opportunities to drift, but there are also a couple of hairpin turns that threw me off the track. Driving through these tracks you will see some Australia fauna such as kangaroos and emus, and groups of cattle too. II would have loved to see some iconic Aussie-branded signage to really make it feel like we were racing in Australia, but I assume there would be IP and cost issues to do that.

The new cars are all Group B rally cars which are known for their powerful engines and aggressive handling. The names in-game may not garner nostalgia, such as the rotary key, das scholar, das maestro, and the kingpin, but they range from hatchbacks to sedans and I recognised their aesthetic more than the names. These cars are a lot of fun to drive, and they really add to the excitement of the game. The new free roam area is a great addition to the game as it’s a large, open area that allows you to explore and practice your racing skills without pressure to get a finish time.

Overal, it’s been great fun jumping back behind the wheel in Art of Rally: Australia. It was cool seeing kangaroos and emus on the side of the tracks and they really nailed the dusty roads and that yellow/orange glow of sundown. I still struggle with the physics of the controls compared to other rally games, but the simple and stylistic graphics grab me every time, and the new Australian tracks and cars were a visual treat.

This review utilised a Steam key provided by Future Friends Games and Art of Rally: Australia DLC is available for AUD13.99 on Steam, Xbox and PlayStation. The Nintendo Switch version will follow later in December.

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