Sega Rally Revo Updated Impressions

Sega has been making the rounds lately, showing off Sega Rally Revo, the latest game in its long-running Sega Rally series. Although the series first hit arcades in 1995, fans have had a long wait for the next title; the last game, Sega Rally Championship, hit the Sega Dreamcast way back in 1999.

The future is now, however, and Sega Rally Revo is shaping up to be something that any fans of rally racing will want to check out. While many of the rally racing games out nowadays favor a more simulation-oriented experience, Revo is unabashedly an arcade-style racer, which features a group of cars going through the paces on a single closed track in a competition to see who can cross the finish line first after three laps.

Our colleagues at GameSpot UK recently took a look at a build of the game and offered up some detailed impressions, but we were treated to a slightly expanded selection of information. The game definitely looks impressive at this point in time, with highly detailed car models and an incredible terrain deformation system that will cause the track to change after each car passes through the muddy sections of turns.

In addition to the tropical environment that was previously on display, we were shown a bit of the Nordic environment. The track here was placed on a mountainside, and the competition saw you and your fellow racers climbing the mountain. As you proceeded up the track, you shifted from dry tarmac to a wet road, and from there passed through a road half-covered by slush until you finally reached the snowy goodness near the peak. This entire sequence of changes took no more than 60 seconds, at which point the process was reversed as the racers went back down the mountain to start the next lap.

We're told the game is going to include six environments (down from the eight environments that Sega mentioned just a couple of months ago), with six track types for each environement. The environments that were specifically mentioned were the tropical/jungle environment, the Nordic environment, as well as safari and arctic environments. Given the series' history, we're betting on the appearance of a desert or sandy environment in there somewhere.

Lastly, Sega promised that there would be at least 30 cars in the game when it shipped, with 34 being the specific number that they're playing around with. In addition to modern cars, we can hopefully expect some series classics (what would Sega Rally be without a Celica?), and we're also told that we can expect to see some "wacky" bonus cars. The possibility that classic tracks from previous games might appear is also something that Sega is apparently in the process of deciding, along with their plans for downloadable content, which sounds as though it's fairly likely to happen.

As old fans of the Sega Rally franchise, we came away from the demo of Sega Rally Revo quite impressed. The game is currently set to come out this winter, so stay tuned to GameSpot for more details on Sega Rally Revo as they come along.