As someone who's 100%'d Absolute Drift and has played every Codemasters (and RBR) rally game - This game is okay.

What works? It carries Absolute Drift's simplistic art style and beats - leading to a game that you can just veg out and slide around the roads in Free Roam collecting all the collectibles.

What doesn't work? Firstly, no pace notes. Don't know if I should hit the hill at full throttle because I have no idea if there's a corner coming up. To pile on the lack of pace notes, there's no feedback from your car. The difference between a perfect slide through a corner and bogging down and spinning out seems to be somewhat random. You can almost never tell if a corner is going to let you cut (again, no notes) or reset you for a 5 second penalty. Then, there's no checkpoints. No way to tell if you're +10 seconds off pace or crushing the competition - so you might have a perfectly clean run only to find out you could've shaved +16 seconds off... on Normal mode!

It's still satisfying to play and when you have a perfect slide and come in first? Amazing but the game feels like it's setting you up for failure and also limiting your restarts. I'd be fine with the limited restarts in career if I at least had pace notes and splits. As it stands, you've got to commit 4+ minutes just to find out you apparently could've been MUCH faster and then have to decide if you want to waste another 4 minutes and one of your limited restarts or potentially waste another 4 stages as now you've got to replay the whole season because you couldn't manage to make up that 16 second deficiency.

As someone who's 100%'d Absolute Drift and has played every Codemasters (and RBR) rally game - This game is okay. What works? It carries Absolute Drift's simplistic art style and beats - leading to a game that you can just veg out and slide around the roads in Free Roam collecting all the collectibles. What doesn't work? Firstly, no pace notes. Don't know if I should hit the hill at full throttle because I have no idea if there's a corner coming up. To pile on the lack of pace notes, there's no feedback from your car. The difference between a perfect slide through a corner and bogging down and spinning out seems to be somewhat random. You can almost never tell if a corner is going to let you cut (again, no notes) or reset you for a 5 second penalty. Then, there's no checkpoints. No way to tell if you're +10 seconds off pace or crushing the competition - so you might have a perfectly clean run only to find out you could've shaved +16 seconds off... on Normal mode! It's still satisfying to play and when you have a perfect slide and come in first? Amazing but the game feels like it's setting you up for failure and also limiting your restarts. I'd be fine with the limited restarts in career if I at least had pace notes and splits. As it stands, you've got to commit 4+ minutes just to find out you apparently could've been MUCH faster and then have to decide if you want to waste another 4 minutes and one of your limited restarts or potentially waste another 4 stages as now you've got to replay the whole season because you couldn't manage to make up that 16 second deficiency.