Death Rally

I sat down with Death Rally expecting a punchy arcade throwback and got something more complicated: a game that's genuinely compulsive in twenty-minute bursts and quietly exhausting if you push past that. This is a PC port of a 2011 iOS and Android remake of Remedy's own 1996 cult DOS racer, and that lineage matters, because you can feel every step of that mobile origin in the design. Races are short, snappy, and chaotic, each one a top-down scramble through city, desert, jungle, and ice tracks where you're juggling a chain gun, deployable mines, and nitro boosts while trying to hold a line through corners that genuinely do not care about your feelings. The car roster runs from the entry-level Vagabond all the way up to the Wraith and Deliverator, and each vehicle can be upgraded across armor, engine, and tires. Weapon upgrades carry over between cars, which is a smart touch. The Black Market also lets you pick up bumper spikes, land mines, and rocket fuel before races, and you can bribe a mechanic to sabotage a rival's car pre-race. On paper it sounds like a meaty progression loop. In practice, the early hours involve grinding on the same short tracks in a car that feels like it's being dragged backward by invisible rubber bands, watching the AI pull away on lap one no matter how much you've leveled up your engine. There are two race types: standard three-lap races against five opponents and deathmatch arenas where kill count decides the winner. Both modes clock in at around two to three minutes per event, which keeps momentum up but also makes the track repetition hit faster than it should. Controls are the game's most divisive topic. Keyboard play is manageable but noticeably stiff, and the guns shoot in whichever direction your car is pointing, so lining up a shot means using your whole vehicle as an aiming reticle. Plug in a gamepad and the analog stick cleans things up considerably, lifting the experience from frustrating to genuinely fun. Weapons auto-fire once you equip a secondary gun, which removes some tactical feel but at least keeps you from fumbling inputs mid-corner. If you are sensitive to fiddly PC port controls, plug in a controller before you start and save yourself the keyboard grief. Multiplayer is effectively dead. Online matches required six players to launch and bots could not fill empty slots, which was a problem at launch and is a bigger one now. There is no split-screen either, so this is a solo game in practice regardless of what the feature list once suggested. The campaign wraps up somewhere between six and eight hours depending on how efficiently you grind, and the final boss, the Adversary, has drawn genuine frustration from the community for being reliant on random box drops for speed boosts and ammo. The story is comic-book framing around a driver conscripted into underground racing to hunt down a champion, which does its job and disappears. If you are playing this hoping for a Saturday night couch session or a drop-in multiplayer night with mates, Death Rally 2012 will let you down hard on both counts. What keeps it alive is the rhythm. Races are short enough that "one more" stays believable for longer than it should. The visual damage model, hoods flapping, smoke pouring, bodywork peeling away, gives just enough tactile feedback to make weapon hits feel worthwhile. Cameo drivers from Alan Wake add a light touch of Remedy world-building humor. It is shallow, repetitive, occasionally maddening, and somehow difficult to fully put down in the short term. Treat it like a score-chasing arcade game rather than a career sim, use a gamepad, and keep sessions short. Expect a lot more than that and the wheels will come off faster than your Vagabond.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

Be the first to comment on Death Rally.