![]() Standing water tends to have a nice glint to it, too, although the actual water effects in Gravel are otherwise disappointing. Gravel’s lighting is generally good, from the beaming desert sun to the soft red glow of taillights in the evening. ![]() There are more granular tuning options which ostensibly relate to specific handling characteristics but they seem out-of-place in this sort of racer. Getting rid of the assists brings back some depth to the handling, although there still doesn’t feel like there’s much difference in grip across the game’s several surface types. The driving dynamics are quite numb with the available driving assists switched on because there’s neither a decent sense of weight nor the arcade-bred slipperiness of the ever-underappreciated SEGA Rally Revo. Aside from new cars these extra wraps are one of the key unlocks rationed out as we progress but I never felt any desire to use them. They look nice enough clad in their most recognisable liveries (like the famous Castrol Celica, or the equally iconic 555 Impreza) but less so in Gravel’s wide range of generic alternate paint jobs. It’s like competing against a slot machine.Īt around 50 vehicles Gravel’s car roster isn’t huge but it is licensed, and there are at least a few rides that rarely pop up in rally games, including a handful of Dakar-bred SUVs and pick-ups, a Porsche I haven’t seen in a racing game since EA’s 2002 off-roader Shox, and an iconic Toyota that mysteriously disappeared from the Dirt series after 2011. I found them frustrating and not particularly fun. ![]() The gimmick is that the ticks and crosses aren’t revealed until you’re a very short distance away and they change on each attempt. These are races against the clock where strips of mystery boxes are placed at regular intervals along the track and we need to crash through the green ticks and leave the red crosses intact or suffer a time penalty. On the other hand, I hate the Smash Up events. Some are considerably better than others I quite enjoyed the high speed cross country races along the Namibian coast strewn with shipwrecks and snaked over giant sand dunes they’re probably the best tracks in the game. The career spans a handful of racing styles, from cross country checkpoint chases to tarmac-based time attacks, and cramped, arena-style races to rallycross-inspired events. Each has no distinguishing characteristics other than a name and a home state so their presence adds very little to the experience. They’re all American blokes who race in unsponsored cars with their actual names written on them, like they’re afraid of losing them in a parking lot. There are five rivals spaced throughout the career who are introduced via some surprisingly dorky FMV vignettes. Let me stress, the boss races are also a lot less interesting than they sound they’re ultimately just standard events against a single opponent instead of seven of them. Other than the occasional boss race the only real baggage the TV show premise comes with is an unlikeable announcer I turned off very quickly. Gravel’s solo mode revolves around a globetrotting, fictional racing TV show dubbed ‘Off-Road Masters’ – but it’s only a thin thread of context to string together what’s essentially an entirely conventional single-player racing career mode.
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