[Review] #Drive Rally doesn’t stay on course with the actual driving

With #Drive Rally we’re influencing more than driving — and that’s not really all that fun

Finally in 1.0 release, #Drive Rally is the follow up to Drive, a mobile game. This sequel is a classically-styled rally racing game — I played it on Steam, but it doesn’t forget its mobile pedigree. Unfortunately that’s where the game has issues. It doesn’t feel much like we’re driving, just more that we’re influencing something to go left and right. It doesn’t feel great, and that’s kind of problematic when we’re talking about a rally racing game that has us transitioning onto different surfaces.

The game has time trials, daily trials, and a bunch of different courses to play, alongside a typical campaign-style racing experience. I do appreciate what the developers are trying to achieve. Instead of a set of courses, there’s an open map system with campaign races through these different parts of the map. We’re not racing between different locations, we’re racing rally checkpoints in what is then just this open world section of the map.

I think that’s a cool design for a rally game, but the problem is that a lot of that then features going from sort of a tarmac surface to a snowy surface or a desert-y surface, a dirt surface — and the grip levels don’t feel great on any of them. They don’t really feel like we’re driving the car, or that the physics are being applied to what the car is. There are also certain corners that are easy to cut, and I don’t mean that in a game time way, I mean in terms of sort of ignore that it’s a corner on a course and just go around it. It does kind of catch us on some of those situations, but if we check the leaderboards there are certainly corners that arebeing taken advantage of.

The open world aspect is nice, though. We can get an idea for how the different cars could feel in an area while we’re exploring, and can collect items to then unlock levels for these open worlds. But there’s really not much other than that, so if the driving doesn’t grab us right off the bat, there’s really not going to be anything that sort of pulls us through the rest of it.

It really comes down to the handling, especially in a racing game that is supposed to be styled after fictional areas and has to use fictional car licenses. It just relies on that being its selling feature. And unfortunately, #Drive Rally just doesn’t meet the sort of standards that I would say that make for a good driving game.

I feel like we’re going through a lot of these retro style rally games right now. I just don’t think the open world aspect is enough to set it apart from what a bunch of these other ones are doing.

This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest Live for April 22, 2025.