Desert Rally

Growing up with a lack of both money and fashion sense, I was usually late in adopting the trends of my contemporaries.

By the time I got around to buying my first shell suit in the early ‘90s they were well on their way to being seen as the hideously gaudy attire that they are today. The fact that it was cheap and poorly made certainly didn’t help matters

Similarly, the trend for line-drawing games has dried up a little of late, but you can always trust a few to arrive late to the party. Desert Rally is one such game, and just like my fashion faux pas it’s not even in the same league as those it seeks to emulate.

You know things going wrong with an apparently simple game when you struggle to understand how to play it. The “How to play” section (comprising a single static screen) could be an algebraic equation for all the sense it makes to fresh eyes.

Having bungled my way through a few early rounds I eventually grasped what the game wanted of me. It continues to make no sense on a conceptual level, though.

Circular timers appear on the screen, each signalling the release of a dune buggy onto the level (there are four available). This gives you sufficient time to draw a line from the starting point to a random finishing point elsewhere on the screen. Sometimes there are multiple points to hit before the finish, at which point the buggy disappears.

Things soon get busy, with multiple cars appearing simultaneously. As with Flight Control, you need to make small alterations here and there to ensure there are no collisions (which mean Game Over).

Leaving aside the nonsensical premise, Desert Rally is an unwieldy mess. Flight Control thrived on a very tightly honed brand of chaos, where you always felt that a solution was perfectly possible if only you’d been quicker or more organised.

You rarely feel in control of Desert Rally, with cars appearing at random and making their way to equally random locations. Developer Istom Games evidently felt that removing the fixed-point elements of its obvious inspiration would take the genre to another level, but it results in a formless, guileless experience.

It’s not a particularly attractive game, either, with a muddy palette and bland 2D graphics.

That Desert Rally is late to the line-drawing party isn’t really the problem: the fact that it fudges new and existing gameplay mechanics alike is.