Gaming Target - Xbox: RalliSport Challenge 2

Written by Tim Stevens on April 27, 2004

First Impressions: The best way to sling mud on an election year.

While the Xbox has never fully asserted it as the place to be for racers, it has played host to a number of great racing games, RalliSport Challenge being one of the first. It presented far from a realistic rally racing experience, but it looked fantastic and was a blast to play, especially with four players. After a long wait RalliSport Challenge 2 is nearly here, and while it still supports four-player split-screen, the real buzz is about 16-player online racing via Xbox Live.

While the game will ship with some nice single-player enhancements when compared to the last game, the online play is what will really sell this sequel. Not only will you be able to get your race on with 16 total players, the game will be included under the XSN Sports banner, meaning you'll be able to setup leagues, tournaments, and track stats via XSNsports.com. If all goes to plan, this game should take over Project Gotham Racing 2's position as the premier online console racing game.

Those without live will still have 4-player split-screen and up to 16 players via system link, along with a number of single-player modes. You can run individual races in any of five racing modes: traditional rally, rally-cross, ice racing, hill climb, and a new crossover mode that promises to pit two drivers head-to-head. There's also an enhanced career mode that will take you through all of those modes, testing your mettle on a variety of surfaces and tracks.

There will be 90 tracks and stages this time, twice that of the last game. All are situated in a certain country and feature landmarks and challenges unique to their respective geographies. Sweden will test your skills at high-speed courses on snow, while Monte Carlo will be more about narrow and twisty asphalt lanes. Perhaps most interesting is a hill-climb course that will send you up the side of the Grand Canyon in the southwestern US.

Thanks to the game's new graphics engine, expect to see quite a bit of the canyon. Draw-distance is remarkably far. As the game's camera pans out to show entire stages there are no pop ups in sight, just endless scenery and detail. Car models also look amazingly detailed and will feature a much more comprehensive damage model than last-time around. Unlike the first game damage will not be purely cosmetic, which should add a good bit of strategy to the demolition derby like games often found in the first game.

There will be 40 cars for you to wreck, including historic rally cars, Group B powerhouses, and other notables. The driving experience is expected to be similar to the first game, emphasizing fun gameplay over hard-core realism, but the cars will have limited tuning options for different styles of tracks, and one hopes the physics engine will be enhanced a bit.