Grand Championship Rally

From a gaming perspective, rally games really should suck.

It was this very thinking that resulted in me mistakenly avoiding every rally game ever while growing up, purely because I didn't really fancy racing for hours on end without seeing another car.

The one time I relented and had a crack at Colin McRae at a friend's house, I spent most of my time driving headfirst into a series of tree trunks. That's a level of realism I can frankly do without.

However, decades on I can now happily report that – as most of you will no doubt be aware – rally games far from suck. Indeed, most manage to offer up the kind of visual splendor and pulsating gameplay other racers would kill for.

Blast from the past

How sad it is, then, that rather than live up to the high standard set by most of its peers Grand Championship Rally feels like a rerun of my earlier fears.

This is a solitary, uninspired, and ultimately boring experience with stripped back visuals and gameplay that barely makes an impression, whether good or bad.

That's because, like a trip back to gaming horrors of old, Grand Championship Rally offers up course after course and nothing more. You'll turn left and right, of course, but distinguishing one series of tracks from another boils down to one fairly rudimentary difference – the colour of the course itself.

The actual act of driving fares little better. With races broken down into short checkpoint affairs (your position in the standings held back until the end of each stage), the controls offer a standard setup – '4' and '6' to steer, '8' to brake.

The quicker you are around each course, the more points you pick up that you can use towards upgrades – although, in truth, you'd need a plethora of them to really lift the experience as a whole.

With a particularly forgiving take on handling, there's simply no feeling that anything you do really has any bearing on your performance on the track, bar breaking sharply before each corner.

Even going off track doesn't punish as it should. Objects you should smash into simply pass through your car like ghosts.

As a result, it's hard not to feel that very little effort has gone into Grand Championship Rally.