Colin McRae Rally 2005 Review

Developer: Codemasters (www.codemasters.co.uk)
Publisher: Codemasters (www.codemasters.co.uk)
Platform: PC-DVD (it’s a DVD only release), also available on XBOX and PS2 (the latter is UK and Europe only)
Released: 23 September 2004 (UK and Europe), U.S. release is planned for Fall 2004
Reviewer Machine: 2.53GHz P4, 1GB Kingston PC2700 DDR RAM, ATI Radeon 9700Pro 128mb (Catalyst 4.9), SoundBlaster Audigy 2 (with EAX 4.0 driver from game DVD), Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback USB, Windows XP Professional with SP1, DirectX 9.0c as required by game.
Review screenshots: originals shot @ 1024×768, 4xFSAA, 4xAF (Anisotropic Filtering)

Introduction

For those of you who are giving up on Richard Burns Rally or just want to have some mindless fun in something much less complicated Codemasters has the new and improved Colin McRae 2005 on the shelves. While staying true to it’s arcade roots the game has improved compared to versions 3 and 4. Enough to warrant a recommendation? Read on and find out.

This review, as with all my reviews, is based on the retail version or the review version of the game as provided by the distributor or PR company. Because there is a patch available from Codemasters comments about the patch were added after the conclusion.

Changes and Improvements

Aside from the obvious tweaks to the graphics and sound system the most important change is the addition of a new Career mode. In this ladder format you race around the globe in different fictional (due to the lack of a proper license) Cups and Series trying to gain points and positions in order to unlock new series and cars. You always need a certain amount of points to progress to the next series but sometimes you also need to have unlocked a specific car class.

All your unlocked cars are stored in the Garage from where they are available in the other game modes. In the Garage you can also see which upgrades have been fitted to the car. You get upgrades for successful tests performed in the Career Series. Although improved from the testing you had in CMR4, which was buggy and sometimes unnecessarily blocking your progress through a championship, it can get a bit tedious because you have to test every component on every car. With 34 different cars and up to five available upgrades you may see what I mean. I ended up selecting one or two cars in a particular class that I wanted to drive and then started upgrading only those cars.

Other Game modes

Apart from the new Career mode CMR 2005 still has the familiar Challenge, Championship and Multiplayer modes. Multiplayer now works through an in game browser to the Gamespy service but due to a lack of consistent servers it was not possible to review this properly. Challenge is where you select a stage or rally and a car from the Garage and blast away. Championship is the “I wanna be Colin” mode. In this mode you go through a complete WRC like championship. You can only select one of the current WRC models to drive in this mode.

Sound & Vision

While driving around the world’s rally stages it’s nice to have something decent to look at from your cockpit (yes, cockpit view is back in all types of stages). In CMR 2005 there are nine different locales to choose from. Each comes with 8 rally stages making a total of 72 (not counting the short SuperStages). You may read about 300+ stages that are supposed to be available in Career mode but those are just all the stages you have to go through added up. In reality you are likely to run repeatedly on the same stages which, like the testing, can get a bit boring in the long run.

I would like to make a note of the new Germany stages because the stages in Germany seem to capture the essence of the real-world event just that bit better than the stages in the other locales (Greece, UK, US, Japan, Spain, Norway, Finland, Australia).

The graphics have always been a strong point of the series and the performance seems to have stayed the same while the overall quality has improved again. The sound department also has done a good job, especially in the area of positional audio. There is no real groundbraking stuff however like the sound effects from GTR. One thing that I do like is the rain effects. From drizzle to downpour, it’s all there and you can see virtually every drop hit your windshield and get blown off at speed or splash all over the scenery.

Physics

As you will expect from a Colin McRae title the cars are easier to drive than their counterparts in, to pick an obvious example, Richard Burns Rally. You could see this as a positive because CMR2005 still makes you feel like you can actually drive a rally car. Just don’t start up “that other title” to keep from losing that idea ;-)

While the above mentioned difference is inherent to the type of game CMR2005 is, I keep having trouble with some other aspects of the physics engine however. One example is gravity. It has improved since CMR4 but jumps are still an affair of very short flights and very hard landings. Aside from slowing down before every jump the only solution to not thrashing you car completely stages with lots of jumps (Finland, Australia) is to set you car up as high as possible with the stiffest springs possible.

Another thing I have with the physics is how the car handles in replays. Like in earlier versions of the game it still seems like there is an invisible hand pushing the car along. The improved replay style that was featured in CMR4 is continued and that means that in order to convey a sense of speed the camera moves and shakes like mad and most of the time fails to properly focus on the car. It’s probably a personal thing but I don’t like to watch the replays because of this effect. It also limits the use of the replay as a tool to improve your stage times.

QA issues

While the game scores some proper points because of the changes from the previous version it’s losing them just as fast because of some avoidable QA problems.

One pretty irritating problem is the menu navigation in the Service Area and other screens. At least with my setup the only way of navigating through the different settings was with the wheel. Another issue was a collision detection error that I’ve encountered on two stages. While running full throttle in a sixth gear corner the car hits an invisible branch from a small brush and is almost totaled.

Conclusion

All in all CMR2005 is probably the best Colin McRae game yet. It’s got nice graphics and sound effects, a large new Career game mode and a good collection of recent and historic race cars. It still can’t shake the ghost of the giant leap forward that was CMR 2.0 however and the quality issues really distract from the overall experience.

As it is not intended as a sim (Codemasters may say so, but we all know better than that) it gets a sim score of 2 out of 5. Overall game score is 3 out of 5, mostly because of the quality issues that should have been caught before the game went into production.

The patch

Some of the QA problems mentioned in this review have been fixed by Codemasters in version 1.1 of the game. The 16 MB patch can be downloaded from our files page and fixes the following problems:

• Any instances of seeing white grass on tracks should now be gone.
• There should be no more flashing sun textures when using “Handicap” on split screen games.
• There is now an option to turn off sun effects within the game, this is achieved my running the game from a command prompt with the “NOSUN” command line option.
• All engine tests now give you the same amount of time to complete them.
• You can now go straight back from High texture quality to Medium texture quality.
• There should be no more flashing sun effects when driving around tracks.
• The random weather in online races will now correctly be random, and not taken
from the previous race.

It’s good to see that the sun effects can be switched off as I found them unusually strong* compared to other games in the genre. Unfortunately the navigation problem in several menu’s has not been fixed.

*and therefore possibly very annoying to people with light sensitivity and / or a form of epilepsy.