Ubi Soft's Pro Rally for the GameCube is a mediocre driving game that will at times have you pulling out your hair and smashing your controller in frustration. Its primary weaknesses are its sloppy control scheme and its floaty physics, which combine to give the cars in the game a disconnected feeling--you're never really driving on the roads in Pro Rally. Rather, you're perpetually sliding across them. The game has some other problems too, like repetitive sound effects, a short career mode, and relatively simple graphics.
On paper, Pro Rally seems like a great rally game. It has 20 licensed cars from manufacturers like Citroen, Seat, Peugeot, Mitsubishi, and Subaru; seven different rallies, including races held in Sweden, Argentina, and Spain; and three different classes of competition. Like in many other rally games, you're tasked with competing against the clock on a number of tracks of varying surface types as your navigator yells out the distance and severity of every upcoming turn. In practice, however, Pro Rally isn't quite so straightforward. Its main single-player component is its career mode, which it refers to as the "professional" mode. Here, you're supposed to advance your driver through three different rally classes--private, kit, and pro--with the overall goal of placing first in the pro leagues. However, you won't be able to access this portion of the game until you successfully complete the 10 tests in Pro Rally's school mode.
While these series of tests were clearly designed to be similar in function to, say, Gran Turismo 3's license challenges, the only thing they actually test is your patience. You're tasked with navigating these short courses before time runs out, and depending on your lap time and the amount of damage your car sustains, you're given a ranking between one and 10. To pass the school mode, you'll need to average six points over the course of 10 tests, though doing so is far more frustrating than it sounds. This is largely due to the game's sloppy controls. The cars in Pro Rally, aside from handling almost exactly alike, lack the traction you'd expect them to have. What's more, using the brakes will sometime cause your car to inexplicably snap sideways, even if you were driving in a straight line on a solid surface like tarmac. Aggravating all this is Pro Rally's digital control. Even though the gas and brakes are mapped to the GameCube controller's R and L shoulder buttons, respectively, they don't seem to make use of the buttons' analog support. That means your car is always either under full acceleration or full braking. In the school mode, this becomes frustrating, because you're forced to restart any given course if you touch a cone or barrel or leave the main path. Pro Rally's slippery car physics and touchy controls make the simple act of staying on the road a nearly impossible chore.
Once you do finish the school mode, you'll be able to proceed to the actual career championships, though here too, you'll notice some problems. You'll be asked to join a team in the private leagues, but you won't be told what the team goals are, even though you're constantly reminded that the team is counting on you to meet its expectations before the start of every rally. As it turns out, you're expected to place first. Despite the game's control issues, placing first isn't a difficult task, though it can be frustrating at times. Adding to this frustration is Pro Rally's unforgiving course out mechanic. In other rally games, you're allowed to venture a good 50-100 feet away from the main road before being reset back onto the course. There are areas in Pro Rally where if so much as one wheel leaves the track, your car will be reset back onto the road. Of course, the game's invisible barrier is usually a few more feet past the edge of the track than that, but generally, you're well advised to stay on the track at all times. The actual act of resetting your car takes an excruciatingly long time as well. When you reach one of these boundaries, your call will come to a stop, the game fades to and then from black as your car is placed back on the track, and then you're forced to wait an additional few seconds as the announcer asks you if you're ready. When's all said and done, you can lose around five to seven seconds with every reset, and because the reset boundaries are so close to the actual track, it's easy to see how frustrating the rally races in this game can quickly become.
The game also models damage to your car, though this damage is never represented visually. You won't even crack a taillight or loosen a bumper in Pro Rally. Instead, damage is represented using eight icons in the lower right-hand side of the screen, one each for your car's steering, engine, differential, gearbox, radiator, brakes, turbo, and electrical systems. The damage that your car sustains seems to be completely arbitrary. Sideswiping a tree, for example, will damage your gearbox. You're able to fix your damage in service areas after every stage, and while this makes it easier on you, it's not exactly to true to the sport, where service areas are spaced between every two or three stages. Partly as a result, it won't take you a whole lot of time to finish the game. Each of the three classes of competition consists of between four and six rally events, and each rally event has between three and four stages. It takes around 10 minutes to zip through a single rally event, and it's possible to finish Pro Rally's professional mode in about an hour.
Once you do, you'll unlock an arcade mode that pits you against seven other cars on the same track, though this too is extremely frustrating, since collision with another car at any speed will stop you in your tracks. This is true of the game's two-player split-screen mode as well. These two components seem like they were an afterthought when compared with Pro Rally's career mode, and that's saying a lot. The sound too, seems quite rushed. All the cars, for example, sound exactly alike. And while switching your driving perspective will also vary the volume and direction of your car's engine sound, all the cars sound the same. Your navigator sounds too excited for his own good, and the music consists of mind-numbing techno that isn't especially good. The game's graphics are passable at best. As mentioned, the car models don't display any kind of damage whatsoever, though they do get gradually dirty as you progress through the rally stages. The cars have environment mapping that is quite visible on some surface types but seems to reflect their surroundings at an extremely choppy frame rate. What's more, some cars will throw massive shadows onto the ground or surrounding walls for a few seconds at a time for no reason at all. And for the most part, the levels are barren and rendered using washed-out and fuzzy textures.
Pro Rally is the first rally game to be released for the GameCube, but even that isn't reason enough to recommend it for purchase. Its problems with control and physics and its largely forgettable graphics and sound can't be overlooked. It's a frustrating game with a career mode that's too short, and, ultimately, you'd be better off without it.
