Rally racing – its tough, dirty and unforgiving. It is a fairly unique motor sport that spans across several different racing surfaces, takes in some really beautiful scenery and provides more thrills and spills than a bar fight at a dodgy nightclub.

The original Rallisport Challenge game captured most of this essence, providing a solid arcade racer that was as pretty to look at as it was fun to play. This time, with the follow up, Digital Illusions studio has risen to the challenge and given us a sequel that keeps all the elements that we loved in the original, gives them a bit of spit and polish, and then adds a bunch of new features to give us one of the best arcade racers ever made.

The game play is very similar to the original but with loads more features added. There are 5 different race types to choose from, and you will need to master all of them to be able to win the championships in single player mode.

Firstly there’s a standard Rally mode, held over several stages, and with your trusty co-driver at your side offering you directions. Then there’s Hill climb mode, which is also set across 2 or 3 stages but this time it involves racing around a mountain, both up and down. This time there is no co-driver and you must race by the seat of your pants. There’s ice racing, a race driven at a more relaxed speed but with very precise movements required to succeed; Rallycross, which is basically laps of a specially designed course that is raced in head to head mode; and Crossover mode which is similar to rallycross but driven as a duel with two cars who meet up in the middle after every lap. Each mode is fairly different and adds a lot of variety to the game. The hill climb mode in particular is quite spectacular, as it combines speed, sharp corners and awesome scenery along the way.

You can play through several difficulty levels, with the amateur and pro modes being fairly simple to win, and the champion and super-rally modes providing a greater challenge. One of the few criticisms you could draw against the game is that the difficulty going from pro to champion mode ramps up very sharply, so there is no real medium difficulty level. This however is no problem for those with Xbox Live capability, as that is where the best of the game comes out. The multiplayer support is top notch, and there are plenty of options available to keep it interesting. The performance over Live is great, with very little or no lag noticeable every time that I played it. The collisions setup is quite interesting, with collisions off you are able to have up to 16 cars in the one race. Interestingly, with collisions off the cars become kind of transparent, which is a little strange at first but you soon become used to it.

As well as Xbox Live support the game also supports system link and split screen multiplayer, as well as time attack and single race modes for single player.

There are over 90 tracks and 40 different rally cars available in the game, which provides plenty of replayability and variety. Much like in Project Gotham Racing 2, you have to play through the single player mode to unlock all of the cars for use in multiplayer mode. As well as this you can unlock different skins for the cars along the way, and this is based on the amount of time spend driving particular cars. This system works well as you will then end up with several different skins for the cars that you use the most and over Xbox Live shows off your amount of dedication.

The controls have more of an arcade than a sim feel to them, and in this game it is definitely a good thing. This is a game where you want to be able to just pick up the controller and race, and in that sense it certainly delivers. You will still have to drive the car in a realistic way in order to succeed but it is fairly forgiving when you do stuff up. For those who know their cars well, there are options to tweak all of the cars to a reasonably detailed level – you can tweak suspension, braking, tyre type and other such things. However for those like me who know little or nothing about the mechanics of these kinds of cars, you don’t have to touch these options. For every race the tyre type is automatically selected according to the track conditions, so you can be as involved or uninvolved in the car set-up as you would like.

Graphically, the game is absolutely amazing. No detail is spared in either the backdrops or the cars themselves. Each track is meticulously detailed, down to swaying of trees, ripples across water and other small details, which all add up to make the environments as realistic as possible. The particles of dust, ice and whatever else that are kicked up as you drive along are also very detailed and realistic, generated dynamically and with full respect given to the racing environment. Sometimes you are so busy admiring the scenery that you forget that you actually have a car to control as well! It is definitely a good problem to have however. Similarly, the detail level of the cars themselves is also outstanding. Full damage models are in place, from minor dents to full panels being ripped off the car. Bash your car around enough and you’ll eventually be driving around in basically just a frame with wheels. The damage does eventually affect the handling of the cars but they take loads of punishment before that becomes a major factor. It should also be noted that in spite of these amazing graphics, not once did I see a noticeable drop in the frame rate or any graphical glitches. The only minor complaint that you could make is that the draw distance for the background can sometimes be a bit short, so the environment sometimes seems to ‘pop or fade up’ suddenly. It isn’t very noticeable at all though; it only seems that way because the rest of the graphics are virtually flawless.

The sound in the game is also very well done, with each car generally having a unique engine sound and the other incidental sounds such as back firing being pretty realistic. The in game music is made up of mostly rock tracks, which fits the game quite nicely. The game of course offers custom soundtrack support as well, so if you don’t like the supplied music you can simply change it. And you probably will want to change it as the in game music tracks can tend to be a bit bland, particularly after you’ve racked up 30+ hours playing this awesome racer (-: