Review by: Doug Trueman
Published: April 2, 1999

Rally Cross 2 is 989 Studio’s attempt to enter the console rally fray. The first title to succeed in this genre was Sega Rally. Unfortunately, the Saturn went belly up and fans looking forward to the sequel will have to wait until September for the release of the Dreamcast. But in the meantime, Rally Cross 2 will more than do as a means of tiding racing fans over until the return of Sega.

As a hard driving, car flipping rally crosser, players take the wheel behind one of ten different vehicles. As in Sony’s masterpiece Gran Turismo, almost every aspect of the car can be modified to suit the player’s preference. Steering can be made loose or tight, shocks can absorb impacts or send the players for a hard landing, brakes can be altered to correct over and understeering, the gearbox can be altered to suit the player’s desired balance of acceleration versus top speed, and players even have a choice of four different types of tires: all-purpose, off-road, snow and slick. Coming up with a modified car to suit the current track requires almost as much skill as racing the tracks themselves. Players are “suggested” to modify their cars between tracks. The allowable modifications don’t go into as much detail as those in Gran Turismo, and hard-core and light gamers will react accordingly.

Once players have chosen a car to race they have ten initial tracks to tear up, six of which must be unlocked. And, in a somewhat interesting and unconventional move, 989 Studios has included two ways of racing for those of us with a cyber deathwish. There is a head-to-head mode where players control a vehicle that is racing a track against a single car travelling in the opposite direction. The other mode puts players against three other cars which are all racing the same track, but again in the opposite direction. Not surprisingly, this mode is called “suicide.”

There are the usual other conventions that gamers have come to expect in racers. There is a time trial mode, a split screen vs. mode, a single race mode and a seasonal mode where players compete against the CPU over a series of tracks run both clockwise and counterclockwise. Points are distributed according to the cars’ final positions and the overall winner is the one that finishes the season with the highest score. The seasonal mode is the backbone to Rally Cross 2, for it is only through this mode that players can unlock extra tracks and cars. Fortunately, gamers can save their progress after any race. If they happen to come in fourth, well, there’s always the reset button.

Although Rally Cross 2 has been done before — and better — there are no real problems with the game. What is far and away the best feature, though, is the inclusion of a track editor. Players can’t create tracks as detailed as the ones the developers at 989 Studios included, but there are many types of courses that can be included. Players start with a blank 8×8 grid and, in the fashion of many map editors that are included with real-time strategy games, can map our their dream course. Rally Cross 2 gives them seventeen different types of track to enter into the grid, including 90 degree turns, tabletop ramps, single jumps, double jumps, bridges, pits, hills and divots, creeks and several more. Lazy players who “cheat” and simply place the same type of track in succession will notice the repeating sections of the track when they race it, but more thorough players will be rewarded with a polished, smooth looking course. The track editor doesn’t make the game, but it certainly adds to an already refined effort by 989.