[General Topics] Menneisyys:
SuperCars (2)? Does it ring a bell? Gangsta Race? Dreamway? Ever wanted to play something like them – but something MUCH better, with freaking good visuals, sound effects, animation, in-game music, incredibly good controls and, last but definitely not least, possibly forthcoming multiplayer support?

I’ve often reported on the current state of the K-Rally project. Thanks to the excellent folks at Infinite Dreams (iDreams for short), who provided me a pre-release beta version of the Pocket PC version of this EXCELLENT racing game, I’ve been playing this title for a week (played it almost entirely through) and am absolutely astonished. Now that I’ve also received the final, commercial version, I’ve quickly played it through to see how it has changed; I've also used this chance to update my remarks / screenshots.

(Note that this review is FULL of in-game screenshots - I've made some 60 of them. Make sure you click the links to see them - I haven't directly included them in the article to keep its size down.)

Best Pocket PC game of 2006?

I don’t think I exaggerate when I state K-Rally is by far the best Pocket PC game released in 2006. Yeah, SkyForce Reloaded, the best top-down shooter for the Pocket PC, is a very close second and there have been some other outstanding titles too; for example, Enslave in the action, Edge in the RPG and, for example, some new 4Pockets games in some other categories, but I’d say K-Rally is even better. (Actually, I’ve thought about whether Edge or K-Rally should be called THE best PDA game of 2006 as both of them are of really high quality and a lot of work has been spent on both of them. Then, I’ve chosen K-Rally because Edge is, originally, a Palm OS game.) Finally, I don’t think desktop conversions like the otherwise great Broken Sword or some Zuma ports, should be compared to native PDA titles like Edge, Enslave, K-Rally or SkyForce Reloaded. After all, they're ports "only", with most of the work (artwork, graphical, music, sound, map, conversation etc. resources and scripts) previously created for the desktop version.

Gameplay

This top-down 2D (note that it has MANY 3D effects, which will already be known to you if you have played SkyForce Reloaded) racing game is pretty simple by default: you race, possibly fire at other cars to slow them down (or, in cases, to destroy them), collect experience points and money (and different powerups from the road), buy upgrades to speed up your car / make it more durable etc. If you’ve ever played the, technically, much-much more inferior Gangsta Race and Dreamway, you already know what the weapons are for :)

You start the game with setting up a profile (this, incidentally, can be done any time if you, for example, find the Easy / Normal level too easy and would like to continue with the Hard level without finishing the easy/normal difficulty levels first). First, you enter your name and, then, the difficulty level must be selected. The Easy and Normal difficulty levels are very easy and don’t really present much challenge – at least in my opinion. Therefore, you may want to start with the Hard level at once. After this, you’ll need to select whether weapons are allowed. I strongly recommend enabling them – without them, the game becomes much more boring. Also, having weapons greatly enhances the strategies you can use to beat your opponents.

After all this, you start with 0 eXperience Points (XP’s). You need to collect these points to unlock different modes: with 0 points, you can only use the Tutorial mode. After finishing the tutorial, you’re given 100 XP’s and must select Quick Race to further increase your XP's – you’ll need 600 for the next step, the Championship mode.

After you’ve collected 600 XP’s, you may want to go straight to the Championship as it’s, in general, much more challenging than the plain Quick Race. Championship, depending on the difficultly level you’ve selected upon creating your profile, will offer 4, 6 or 7 leagues, each consisting of several (between, in general, 6 and 10) races.

After successfully finishing a league (if you're the first; if you aren't, you'll need to start from the beginning of the given league), you’re assigned a new car as can be seen in here (showing the best car given at the end of the sixth league on Hard level.) With this car, the maximal speed will be about 155 Mph (without turbo) with all the upgrades. (The latter, however, will cost you an arm and a leg – for example, the best engine upgrade costs $30000, which is pretty complicated to collect even in Hard mode and the last league, where the prize of the first is $3000-$3500. Compared to this speed, the speed of the car you’re given in the first league of all the three levels are really disappointing – about the half. Fortunately, as has already been mentioned, you aren’t forced to play through the easy / normal leagues if you go straight for the Hard difficulty level.)

After collecting 5000 XP’s, the Career mode will also be unlocked. It’s pretty hard even in Medium difficulty level (much harder than the Championship mode) so I really recommend playing through the Championship mode first, even if you’ve already passed the 5000 XP threshold (playing the entire Championship league through gives you some 30 000 XP’s). Also see the "Best practice" section below for more tips to follow.

Finally, there’re Random tracks (requiring 18 000 XP’s so you’ll need to play through at least both the easy and normal leagues – if you start with the former) where tracks are generated in a completely random way and a Ghost mode (requiring 3000 XP’s to unlock), which is great for practicing (it helps you in fine-tuning your controls by showing the route you've followed in the last lap) but is pretty boring and non-challenging otherwise.

Availability

The game is available for purchase at ClickGamer and Handango. The homepage of the game is here - really worth keeping an eye on it to see whether there're upgrades. Also, following the official forum is recommended.

It doesn’t have a trial version, which is pretty understandable, given that a simple dumbed-down (for example, only the first league – with a crappy, slow car; it’s only at later leagues that you’re given faster cars) would have been a severe impact on the demo – only based on my experiences with the slowest car, I wouldn’t be sure I’d buy the game. The same stands for in-game music: it’s only by playing some leagues completely through that you’ll see most leagues have at least four different, very cool and original music tracks. With an one-league demo, demonstrating this would be impossible. All in all, I understand why the iDreams folks haven’t come up with a demo / trial of the game.

In general, I’m strongly against Pocket PC developers not releasing trial versions – sometimes I even disqualify these titles from my full roundups. The case with iDreams, however, is entirely different – they produce really high-quality games and can be safely purchased without your getting, later, disappointed. I’m pretty sure your WM2003, WM2003SE or WM5 Pocket PC will run the game without problems. I haven’t had speed problems, only on my 195 MHz, non-overclocked HTC Wizard when using the stylus to control the car (as has been pointed out in many of my game reviews, the Wizard is especially sensitive to stylus usage - if you do keep the stylus pressed on the screen, the overall speed of the device decreases considerably). However, overclocking the Wizard (see this for a tutorial) to 240 MHz certainly helped this - then, the game became quite playable, even with the stylus. Note that in this case you can also disable extra visual effects in the Options menu to further increase the speed.