Review: Victory Heat Rally

The closer you move to reality in a racing game, the faster I lose interest. I love racing games, or just driving games in general. I play them all the time, and I have for most of my life, but I have no interest in the Gran Turismos of the world. Even Forza and The Crew are pushing it. It’s not really until you hit Burnout territory that you can get my attention.

But I especially love racing titles from the time before polygonal 3D took over. OutRun, Rad Mobile, the incredible Cool Riders: games that had to rely on graphical tricks and math to make their roads stretch to the horizon. One such method was Sega’s “Super Scaler” technique, which would stretch, shrink, and rotate sprites to make them look like they’re closer or further from the screen. This resulted in games like the aforementioned Rad Mobile and, more importantly, 1988’s Power Drift. That’s where Victory Heat Rally gets its design.

When it had its successful Kickstarter campaign in 2020, Victory Heat Rally was all in on the Super Scaler visuals. A lot of that has been lost in the final version, but the result is a clear love letter to a beloved corner of the arcade.

Victory Heat Rally (PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Skydevilpalm
Publisher: Playtonic Friends
Released: October 3, 2024
MSRP: TBA

Despite its name, Victory Heat Rally is a mix of circuit-style tracks, rallies, and side modes. If you go through the campaign mode, you’re dropped on a map screen that has you go through each of the cup’s tracks individually before getting more competitive in a Grand Prix. You can also play classic Arcade GP and Time Trials, but those kind of feel like side activities with Championship mode as the focus.

The vibrant visuals front the entire game. Early footage of the game’s development showed a closer adherence to the Super Scaler motif, with its tracks made of segmented sprites. That was dropped somewhere along the way in favor of a smoother look to the tracks, and while a lot of the scenery is still 2D sprites, there are a number of 3D elements to the environments. Because of the sacrifices, it doesn’t look like a lost arcade game from a bygone age. Though, you can play with a pixel filter, which I preferred.

But the spirit is still there. Tracks are veritable rollercoasters that dip and climb and loop around themselves. The camera tilts as your car turns hard around corners and shakes on hard bumps. It’s also fast. Very fast. The visual style is largely excellent, and the bright colors and chibi proportions give it a unique feel, even against older titles from where it gets its inspiration from, such as Power Drift and Choro-Q.

As a racing game, Victory Heat Rally plays a lot like recent Mario Kart games without any weapons or items. There’s a lot of emphasis on drifting around corners (or just as much as you possibly can), as doing so will give you a boost. It’s exactly like Mario Kart’s drift system, where you build up levels of “sparks” based on the speed and tightness of the turn. It works well, but it can get a little weird at times.

I think this is partially based on my choice of gamepad. I was playing with a PlayStation Dualsense, which has an analog trigger. Occasionally, my drift would reverse direction if I went directly into an opposite turn rather than use the boost I had built up. It’s just a theory, but I think this might happen if you ease off the drift button (the trigger) but don’t let it go entirely.

I had a lot of frustration with gamepad controls, and I think this started after a recent update to the pre-release version because I don’t remember having issues when I started. Most frustratingly, when going through menus, it would register button presses multiple times, so if I wanted to select a track to see what medal I had on it, it would sometimes go directly into the starting grid, forcing me to open the menu and quit the race.

For that matter, I don’t feel like I should have to select a race to see what medal I have on it. There should be a quicker way; at the very least having it shown on the world map itself. You need a certain number of points accumulated to access later GPs, so I’d have to go back through previous events individually to see which ones I only had silvers on. And to make matters worse, going off the edge of a map is supposed to take you to the next cup, but often would just take me to some random cup that might even be in a completely different driving class. It became frustrating in the later stages of the Championship mode.

The frustration is compounded by the incredibly uneven difficulty curve. Occasionally, I’d hit a rally whose target time was much tighter than seemed reasonable. I’d feel like I ran a perfect race in a higher-end car, just to find I was a second or two off from gold. So I’d run it again and again, and each time would get the same result. And this started happening as early as the second class.

That may just sound like a skill issue, but when I’d encounter the track again in the context of a GP, I would absolutely wipe the floor with the computer drivers. In fact, regardless of whether or not I’d struggle with a rally race, I never lost a single GP, which are set up as the real events. The challenge should stiffen toward the end rather than be a breeze outside a few random events.

The occasional spike in difficulty led me to abandon my perfect gold run attempt, so I haven’t entirely finished the game. The last GP I came to seemed to require a gold on every track just to participate, and I wasn’t willing to try and scrape off the fraction of a second I needed to complete some of the rallies. My frustration had already peaked, though I could see myself going back later after I’ve cooled.

A lot of this points to a simple lack of polish. It’s stuff that could conceivably be patched later on, and it’s nothing end of the world right now. It can get in the way of the good-feel racing, but not nullify it entirely.

However, another problem arises further into the game, which is that, despite its outward style and garish colors, there’s a weird monotony in Victory Heat Rally. A lot of the cars you can drive look the same: a series of boxy coupes broken up by the odd curvier number. I could honestly not tell the difference between some of them, which took much of the fun out of unlocking new characters. Adding liveries to their design might have been enough to add a dash of personality, but most are just flat paint jobs. Speaking of which, additional colors have to be unlocked for each individually by winning enough races. And you can’t pick; they get unlocked in a linear fashion.

The tracks tend to run together as well. They’re all smoothly curving rollercoasters with lots of elevation. Well, not all of them. You can certainly tell the difference between a snowy one with slick streets and an airport theme with narrow roads. However, they often lack hooks like you’d find in, say, an F-Zero track. There are no unique hazards to be found, few with 90-degree turns, and not many ridiculously long jumps. I think part of the problem is that they go by so fast. Most of them feel great to race on, but there are so many of them, and they begin to blur together.

The soundtrack has a similar issue. The tunes are mostly enjoyable, chirpy, and high-energy, but you’ll miss them if you blink your ears. There’s also one singular song mixed in that I absolutely loathe. I think it only came up twice in the whole game, but it was enough to make me consider turning off the music entirely.

In general, I really enjoyed Victory Heat Rally. But anytime I’d sit down with it, frustration would build until I would have to take a break. And it isn’t frustration with the racing itself, either. When wheels are on the pavement, everything is fine. It’s energetic, quirky, and full of fun, drifting action.

It’s the house that was built for the actual racing that is the problem. Beneath the vibrant colors and retro sensibilities, it’s disappointingly unpolished and monotone. Getting through the championship took me short of 6 hours, but it feels like it would be better off being half that with better attention to detail. As it stands, Victory Heat Rally isn’t the bumpiest ride I’ve been on, but it would benefit from a tune-up.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}