V-Rally 4 - Ford Shelby GT500 (DLC)

My first hour with V-Rally 4 went something like this: spin off a cliff, restart, spin into a boulder, restart, accidentally earn a drift trophy while having zero control of the car. That cycle tells you almost everything you need to know about where this game sits in 2025. After a sixteen-year gap since V-Rally 3, developer Kylotonn clearly wanted to modernise the series, but the result is a handling model that never fully commits to being arcade fun or simulation depth. The identity problem is the real issue here. The cars feel twitchy and light at speed, demanding hair-trigger analog stick inputs that punish any casual approach, yet the physics never reward the precision that a proper sim player expects. Point-to-point rally stages are genuinely the best mode on offer: fictional courses winding through Monument Valley, Romanian mountain roads, Siberia, and Malaysian jungle give off-road racing a wide visual variety that a lot of mid-budget racers skip entirely. But step into the Buggy races or V-Rally Cross events and you run straight into broken AI that swings wildly between laughably easy and borderline impossible within the same championship, with no rewind button to soften the blow of a seven-minute stage wrecked on the last corner. Hillclimb holds up reasonably well as a pure time-attack mode, and Extreme-Khana, the gymkhana-style obstacle discipline, is probably the most consistently entertaining of the five because the stunt courses mask the handling quirks behind pure chaos. On the content side, there is more here than the mixed reviews suggest. The career mode asks you to manage a team, hire mechanics, researchers, and agents, land sponsorships, and pay repair bills. It has genuine ambition on paper. In practice the progression structure is unclear, the menus are cumbersome, and winning races earns you so little fanfare that the grind feels hollow. The car roster sits at 51 vehicles from 19 manufacturers including Porsche, Skoda, and Norma, with a mix of classic rally machines and buggies that will click for series veterans even if it looks thin next to modern rivals. Visual quality swings between genuinely beautiful weather effects and some rough, aliased scenery depending on the track, and the in-car cockpit cam is almost unplayable, so stick to third-person. One bright spot worth flagging for couch sessions: the game includes split-screen multiplayer, which bumps it up meaningfully for anyone looking for something different to throw on at a Saturday night get-together. If you have a steering wheel setup and patience to burn, there is a niche audience for whom this clicks. The handling model, once tamed, does have a certain old-school spring and weight to it that fans of the original PlayStation titles will recognise. But for most PC racing fans right now, DiRT Rally 2.0 and WRC Generations are close in price and vastly more polished. V-Rally 4 earns its Mixed Steam score honestly: not broken, not without charm, but not worth full price when better options are one tab away.

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