#DRIVE Rally is a combination of quite a few good ideas, and at first glance, its pairing of a more arcade-style approach with '90s rally nostalgia has a lot of appeal. Its art style is both rugged and beautiful, and it does well to showcase a roster of locations and a wide stable of cars. The problem that I had with the game is that its ideas are good, but none of them feel fully thought through. The predominant thought that I've had while playing #DRIVE Rally is how good the game could have been, but it simply falls short.

There are three modes in #DRIVE Rally: championship, quick race and free roam. Within the championship, you select your team among the decent handful of options, each with their own series of cars that you unlock and a codriver that's specific to the team. The championship spans a couple of dozen race events, and every fourth event, you unlock a new car and compete in the next three races in that vehicle. This also means that when you're starting to get acclimated to a car's specific nuances, it's time to jump into a completely different vehicle. After winning a race, you earn money that's used to unlock cosmetics for your cars.

As with many other aspects of the game, the championship mode feels like a shadow of what it could've been. You swap cars to different cars so often that it's difficult to care about its cosmetics, which you have to back out of the championship completely to apply. Since there are no performance unlocks, there is no progression to be found, and a lot of the cars handle very similar to each other anyway. Once you've played about five stages and driven a couple of different cars across a few different areas, you've effectively played the entire game, and the remainder becomes a repeat with different skins for the car and/or location.

If it's a championship, there really should be some decent competition. You aren't competing against anything else, and although you get feedback about how far "ahead" you are every time you pass through a stage gate, you'll never know who that is. There are no championship standings, no points gained, etc.; the championship is really just a series of quick races. Even the "ahead" times are laughably easy, as you'll routinely be 20-30 seconds ahead by the end of your race.

Annoyingly, you'll also start every race with a ghost of the fastest time on the online leaderboards to race against. I liked this feature right up until I realized that course limits don't matter as much as they should, and the fastest times are just as much about knowing how to best cut the course as it is about being a skilled driver. Stray too far from the course, and the game teleports your car back onto it at a dead stop, but it's also a lot easier to take a hairpin if you just ... skip the hairpin entirely. To place well on the leaderboards, it's important that you know how to cheat equally well.

That isn't to say that cheating isn't also a skill because the physics of the game are all over the place. You'll tear through a snow fence with barely any effect on your car, but a fence that's made of what looks to be a dozen sticks will stop your car deader than a concrete barrier. Small bushes are obliterated by your car at speed, while merely medium bushes are indestructible foliage of doom. Hitting a tire wall at any point makes them somehow rearrange into a ramp to pop your car into the air and potentially roll over. Ironically, hitting such a tire wall is also the only time you'll ever get the chance to get any air. It's overly punishing, and it makes driving in #DRIVE Rally a downright chore.

Damage isn't represented, so there's no real downside to hitting that unbreakable plant life other than losing a massive amount of time, but considering that you could park the car for 20 seconds in any given race and still "win," that doesn't hardly matter, either. Cars have their own looks and sounds even if their handling doesn't differ, but some of them sound awful. I get that it's an arcade game, but one car had sound effects that I couldn't place except that it sounded like furniture being thrown around a small room. The Tofuyama car sounds like someone turbocharged a slide whistle, and it would've been less annoying if someone had blown a New Year's Eve noisemaker into a microphone instead.

It's all very disappointing because every facet of #DRIVE Rally is something that really could've been something special had it been thought through or fleshed out more than it was. The only strength is the game's presentation and art style, but when the remainder of the package is an arcade-style rally game that has no progression and a series of rough edges, it becomes impossible to want to keep playing for very long.

Score: 5.3/10

Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, 64 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 4070 Ti