Assetto Corsa Rally (Early Access)

Driving very fast for many laps around an oval track with only left-hand turns, in a racing car without power steering, is of course difficult. Driving very, very many laps in an LMP car, at night, on very fast tracks or driving a Formula cart around Silverstone is of course also very difficult. There are not many drivers on this bright blue planet who can do it with a successful result. However, all of that is infinitely easier than steering a Lancia at 220 km/h on a gravel-covered forest road that measures 3.4 meters wide, is surrounded by spruce trunks as thick as Peter Harryson and was designed to accommodate sporadic traffic up to 40 km/h. It is the hardest thing you can do in a car. It is the world's most demanding motorsport. It is where the world's best drivers generally gather and it is often so mind-bogglingly furious to watch, for these reasons, that the adrenaline rush tops even the wildest of garage roof jumps. Rally... Is life.

But the rally genre felt dead as recently as two months ago. Dead. KT Games and their licensed WRC games not only went downhill, lacking the most vital parts of a sensible rally experience, they were also shut down. Codemasters and EA picked up where KT left off and despite phenomenal potential and a brilliant development team, EA Sports WRC never became the game it could have been. The flop was a fact, EA sold the license back to GMBH and kicked all 78 out of the WRC team. The small part of the large, broad racing genre that consisted of rally games - felt more dead than in 20+ years. The sadness was a fact. As a passionate sim racing fanatic and lifelong rally fan, I really began to doubt that I would be able to keep my own hobby going without a sensible rally alternative. just a few weeks later, the first real rally simulator since 2004 was announced. Assetto Corsa Rally has been in development since the fall of 2021, it has been developed by a "dream team" within the subgenre, with technical support from Assetto Corsa studio Kunos Simulazioni and offers simply the most uncompromisingly realistic simulation of rally since Swedish Warthog's cult Richard Burns Rally (21 long years ago).

Assetto Corsa Rally is released today and then in the form of an early access version. The game is planned to reach 1.0 form in February-March 2027 and Supernova Games of course promises regular updates containing new countries, tracks and cars. The version that is now being rolled out contains two rally countries; France and Wales and ten cars. There are four tracks in the release version that measure 3.3 kilometres of unique road (all-in-all) and there are 14 versions of these tracks. All 33 kilometres of road have been laser scanned, which means that the rally genre has of course received the same technical attention and detail that the rest of the sim racing genre has received over the past 15 years. Every little grain of gravel has been modelled according to laser scanned environments in these two countries and the cars have been recreated through more advanced and detailed measurements and test drives than in any previous rally game. When Assetto Corsa Rally reaches 1.0 in 18-19 months, it will, according to Supernova Games, offer 120 kilometres of unique, laser scanned, real WRC road and 33 cars in six different classes. No content is licensed by WRC and GMBH, which means that the developers can work at their own pace with the material that they and the players prefer.

Supernova Games is an Italian studio where most of the developers have worked with racing games for decades. Here we find Assetto Corsa veterans, WRC generation graphics, Dirt Rally 2.0 programmers and everything in between and according to the team there has never been any doubt about the goal; To create the most realistic rally experience the gaming world has ever seen. Have they succeeded already in early access, with version 0.1? The simple answer to that question is yes. In Assetto Corsa Rally, every little aspect of the rally cars on offer is simulated. Individual suspension and suspension, four-part brake systems, weather, changing terrain, humidity, chassis flex and so on. The ratio between torque and peak power is very well balanced, just like the movement of the centre of gravity.

Just like in a real rally, a lot is about controlling the car with the brake and just like in a real rally, rolling gravel is treacherous for those who don't dare to stand on the gas. Constant all-wheel drive and a centre differential with torque vectoring mean that you as a driver have to keep the torque, momentum and drive in the tires to not slide off the road and here Supernova Games has done a brilliant job. It certainly feels a bit like the lack of lateral grip has been exaggerated a bit sometimes to make driving more difficult (and thus increase realism) like Richard Burns, but it's also about relearning, for me as a driver. It's about never braking when the road turns. It's about learning to listen to the notes and then position the car well, well in advance before it turns, cut the curve on the inside and make sure that all braking is done well in advance before then accelerating through the turns. This is extra super important in the older veteran rally crews in this game and the simulation of the feeling of driving (fast) four-wheel drive on gravel is very, very well done. Assetto Corsa Rally is challenging and you, like me, are guaranteed to crash a dozen nice cars before you get into the change of driving style that is required here, but unlike Richard Burns Rally it never becomes unforgiving in that punishing way that creates unnecessary frustration. Instead, the emulated behaviour of the cars and the tire physics are so communicative that I as a driver always understand exactly what mistake I made when things go wrong (literally).

Another aspect of this game that is so terribly impressive already in early access is the graphics. Supernova Games has worked with Unreal Engine 5 for the graphics and then used Kuno's Assetto Corsa Evo physics engine on top of that, which has proven to work perfectly. Unlike EA Sports WRC, Rennsport, Assetto Corsa Competizione or Ride (other racing games based on the Unreal Engine), there are no major concerns with poor anti-aliasing, flickering shadows, microstutters or other crap here, instead Assetto Corsa Rally flows incredibly well and offers graphics that, without any real competition, outclass everything else in this genre right now. This game is simply brutally beautiful and considering that all the roads have been laser-scanned and then recreated with more than ten times more "foliage" than the entire EA Sports WRC, it wouldn't be the least bit tricky if the early access version had some problems with the display update and graphical bugs. I haven't noticed a single one during my hours and have been able to run Assetto Corsa Rally in a perfectly adapted triple-screen setup with perfect field-of-view (there are lots of really, really good settings here) and everything but two parameters on "Ultra".

Just as impressive is the sound, which finally mimics the mechanical, edgy roar of the rally forest in the way that we rally fans have longed for. The engines scream, the gearboxes whine and the anti-lag system makes the exhaust pops echo through the forest edges in a way that often makes me shudder. I would like a little more gravel mats against the undercarriage of the car but I also understand the problem with increasing that part, because then I risk drowning the map reader in the noise. The notes are also really good, both in terms of choice of voice, articulation and timing and for anyone who wants them later or earlier, they can of course be changed. The amount of settings that are already included in this early access version is substantial and you can really activate or deactivate almost everything, which of course we sim racing fans today demand. Just something like the fact that Unreal Engine can be demonstrably steered towards a mode where real, proper triple-screen setups are possible (despite Codemasters saying it's not possible) speaks volumes about a developer who understands their core target audience to the fullest extent.

The only thing I don't really intend to praise at the moment is the sense of speed, which is a bit weak when the field-of-view is turned off. This has nothing to do with the scaling like it did in WRC Generations (where a mailbox could be as big as a Toyota Yaris) but with Supernova's priorities. An even greater sense of speed would certainly make the game even more challenging, which of course could be devastating for the uninitiated, but I would still like it to be increased a little. Apart from that and the fact that this early version of the game lacks variety in the form of more tracks and more cars, there's pretty much nothing I want to complain about here. I've been writing about games since the mid-90s and have dabbled in sim racing on a daily basis since 2004 and have never tested a "beta version" of a racing simulator that has been this good straight out of the gate. To say that Assetto Corsa Rally promises well would be completely wrong. It is already fantastically good in so many ways and with more rallies and more cars we are facing the brightest future this subgenre has ever seen. And this just when I feared it would be all but dead in the rally forest. Imagine how wrong you could be.