Colin McRae Rally 2 Developer: In-house Publisher: Codemasters Category: : Rally Driving System Req: P500Mhz, 64Mb, 4x Cd-Rom, Win95/98, Direct3D video Might look like: Colin McRae Rally Date posted: 2 April 2001 Written By: Tom - This game was reviewed on Athlon 800Mhz, 128 Mb RAM, Aopen GeForce II GTS 32 Mb RAM, SoundBlaster Live!, Win98 SE - We also test other games on "PlayDevil.com Game Machine" It's all in the little things I can't say I have a lot of experience in rally games. Of course, I played them once in a while, but always came back to the 'Need For Speed'-games. I guess I never really liked rally games because they were too difficult. You have to get used to the driving, and I never really took time to do so. I knew that playing Codemasters' latest higly anticipated rally game Colin McRae Rally 2.0. would probably leave me the same way. But the game was announced for a long while and I had seen the announcement video some time ago, which pleasantly surprised me, so I decided to give it a try. Demanding After the intro, which was originally released a couple of months before the game, the main menu is shown. The menu is comprehensive, and great to view. The in-game graphics are absolutely stunning! The trees are made up of sprites, not polygons, that's about the only downside of the engine. CMR2's graphics may be stunning, they're also demanding. I was a little surprised that my GeForce2 GTS couldn't reach a decent framerate with all the detail on. I tried to improve the game performance by disabling the terrain map. I also took a standard-resolution of 1024x768, and the game ran a lot better. There is no significant difference between the 16bit and 32bit color settings, so I used the 16bit setting, which improved my frame rate even more. Just take a look at the screenshots below.    Realism The game is highly realistic. If you could take pictures of some of the in-game action and show them to people, they would probably believe it were 'real photos' and I'm not kidding. The surroundings are great, large and open. An incredible sight is the Sweden-level where you're driving on a large frozen lake and you can see the distant trees on the horizon, where you'll drive through later. It's pretty the same in the 'France-level' where you drive up a cliff and see the road in the valley where you've just driven a minute ago. The car leaves a trail of dust, mud, and tire marks, depending on the surface you're driving on. When it rains you can see the reflection of the lights in the shiny surface of the wet road/grass. And I'm glad to say that even your car can get dirty! Oh yes! The creators did spend a lot of time creating realistic damage to your car. Let me get back to that later in the review.    Gameplay The game features a couple of different (classic) race types: "Rally"; "Arcade", "Time attack" and "Challenge". There's also a 2-, 3- and even 4- player option. On the novice difficulty setting I instantly won the full rally season, ending most of the time on place 'one' and 'two'. The intermediate setting changes a few things. The drivers get better and each part of the rally now have extra stages depending from 4 or 5 in the novice setting to 8 and more in the intermediate one. Next Page Up Previous Page If you want to review your favorite game, or if you work with a computer game company and want your products reviewing, mail info@playdevil.com. All contributions are welcome. Any problems and/or suggestions are always appreciated on webmaster@playdevil.com Nothing of this entire Site, animation & logo's included, may be reproduced, stored, saved, transmitted, in any form or means, electronic, written or otherwise without the prior permission of PlayDevil. Other Logos & Names are Copyrighted Material of its respectful owners. All Rights Reserved. PlayDevil Productions © 199/8-199/9-200/0 "rip your own stuff"