Dragon Rally Hands-on Preview

I hadn’t actually heard of Dragon Rally until a couple of weeks ago, despite it being in production for almost two years. I’ve also never played a racing game in my entire life, or even seen a car, but it was decided I would be the perfect representative to check out Dragon Rally at a recent preview event in London.

I don’t think you really need to understand racing games, or even stuff like what the handbrake does, to know that Dragon Rally looks like the most realistic video game ever produced. So intense are its hairpin turns and other sorts of corners that within fifteen seconds of seeing the game running I almost passed out from vertigo.

Most serious racing games these days shock and awe with ultra-realistic cockpit views and tactfully applied motion blur and depth of field effects to simulate the head bobs, hard jolts and tumultuous knocks of competitive driving. Dragon Rally ramps this up to the extreme, and the bumpy, jagged driving shakes you up so much you feel like you’ve been chopped into cubes and chucked in a blender.

You can play Dragon Rally from numerous viewpoints, and apparently the cockpit view is so extreme that the game might actually insist on having you play from another camera angle every couple of hours. There’s the standard external and internal perspectives (these unlock in a shocking narrative twist about half-way through the game) but you can also play from a second-person Dragon’s Eye view and, if you’ve pre-ordered the game from participating retailers, also from the left and right side of the car.

What really makes Dragon Rally unique from other rally games, though, is that it features lots and lots of massive dragons. How the dragons managed to turn up just as the world’s biggest competitive rally tournament was about to kick off is yet to be explained, but through a series of winks and nods with the development team I sussed out that this will be revealed as part of the game’s stunning narrative development.

Still, you can’t just jump into a vehicle and start racing. It’s going to be a controversial choice, but Dragon Rally makes you undergo a series of gruelling license tests before you’re allowed to even step inside a car. Part of the extensive lore of Dragon Rally (I’m told a direct-to-DVD movie and a six issue comic series are in the works) is that each driver is required to trek into the terrifying fiery mountains of Slieve Snaght and slay a dragon before being given the keys to your starting vehicle.

This part of the game takes place from a third-person perspective but the controls are the same as when you’re in a car: right trigger makes your hero go forward and left trigger backwards. Attacks are mapped to the A button, and I was also told there might be some other buttons incorporated into the final version. I was forced to take down a fire-breathing monstrosity with nothing more than a bag of penny chews and a random shoe I picked up earlier in the game, which was thrilling but sadly impossible.

Thankfully I was allowed to skip forward and get behind the wheel of a Soobooru Impreeeza WXR SIT ’07 (a rumour going around is that the names and designs of the cars have been changed just enough from any potential real-life counterparts to escape any possible copyright-infringement lawsuits) and take on the ruthless twists and turns of the Snow Mountain course.

One of the biggest problems with the game at the moment, however, is that the dragons can quite easily kill you and your co-driver at the starting line – this can be very frustrating when playing online, as you might imagine. According to a representative I spoke to on the day this is because the AI code for the winged monsters has become so advanced that the development team has literally lost control.

The game works everything into an elegant career mode that has you looking to become world rally champion while avoiding the wrath of the dragons. This is split across the likes of typical Rally events alongside Hill Climb, Rallycross, and Championship options. Each set of events is topped off with a boss encounter, in which you take on one particular fire-breathing dragon in a battle to the death.

While all this goes on you’re also racking up experience points and progressing the skills of your driver. With greater levels come more upgrades, and collecting these is absolutely critical to your progression: get your driver to level 15, for instance, and you can absorb 25 per cent of the damage from flames.

There’s an extensive selection of upgrades, spread across four tech trees, for your driver, but despite all those options Dragon Rally doesn’t believe you should be faffing about under the hood of your vehicles. Each car comes with only two tuning options, “fast” or “faster.” The “fast” option is currently greyed out and will be distributed after the game’s launch via a patch, I’m told.

Dragon Rally Studios is aiming for about three hundred hours of content to ship on the disc, although one representative told me some nerdy sod will probably rinse the game in just shy of an hour.

While I only managed to get off the starting line once in about three hours of play, when it happened the results were phenomenal. The driving is fluid and visceral, the combat is polished, and if you’re a fan of both dragons and rally driving then you’re definitely going to love chowing down on what Dragon Rally is cooking up. This game is shaping up to be a violent, rip-roaring and violent assualt on my senses. Of all the racing games I’ve ever played, this is one of them.

Dragon Rally is scheduled to be released on Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii, DS, 3DS, Atari Lynx, PS2, and Commodore 64 in August 2019.