5 Thoughts From Playing Assetto Corsa Rally In Early Access

Normally, we’d be telling you about how we’re playing X game after X months or years of waiting, ending a long time of anticipation.

Not today, however. Assetto Corsa Rally came with a stealth reveal during October’s Sim Racing Expo, and it’s now already available in primitive early access form.

We’ve been putting in the hours since its release, and have a few thoughts…

Handling is (mostly) superb

Given Assetto Corsa’s roots in circuit racing simulation, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that AC Rally is focused on realism. That’s reflected superbly in the handling and physics model, which gets things spot on. Most of the time, anyway.

Across gravel and loose surfaces, steering feel and weight transfer in cars are convincingly accurate to real-world counterparts. Modern four-wheel drive cars feel fast, neutral and capable, while old-school rear-driven stuff proves a real handful. Don’t ask us how many times we’ve spun a Lancia 037.

Tarmac needs work, though. It does it better than EA Sports WRC ever did, but cars still have a sense like they’re skating across a paved surface rather than gripping onto it, which leads to a bit of a floating sense. Hopefully that’s something that can easily be rectified, given how closely related to AC Evo it is (So much so that our rig’s haptic setup picked Rally up as Evo…)

This isn’t for the faint of heart

It’s not a matter of if things will go wrong in AC Rally, but rather when. While Codemasters’ and Nacon’s recent efforts at rally games always felt like they had a safety net baked in to make you feel like a hero, that’s not the case with AC.

Survival proves key, as AC is incredibly unforgiving. Run with full damage on, and even the smallest of overcorrections can lead to some massive accidents that will very quickly end a promising personal best.

You have to switch your mindset from all-out blistering stage times to simply making it to the finish line. Dirt Rally 2.0 may be about to hand over its baton as the Dark Souls of rally games.

Laser-scanned stages are a revolution

Laser scanning technology is something that has allowed many circuit racing simulators to deliver life-accurate racetracks that offer a very convincing replica of real-world counterparts.

That’s never been tried in a rally game before, largely due to the work involved to create a multi-mile point-to-point rally stage being significantly more than a dedicated closed-course facility.

Yet, Supernova Games Studios and Kunos Simulazioni have taken on that task for AC Rally, and the effect is profound. It leads to stages that feel more convincing both in scale and treachery, putting you closer to the real thing than anything ever has.

It looks stunning and runs well

Curiously, AC Rally runs on Unreal Engine 5 rather than the same in-house architecture as Evo, albeit a heavily customised version.

It looks stunning as a result of that, with its surface reflections both across stages and car bodywork providing some of the highlights of the spectacle. Better still, despite UE5 having some common quirks and being infamous for stuttering on EA WRC, there’s no evidence of that here. Our AMD 9070 has coped well with it, running a solid 70-80fps on high settings across all conditions.

It’s too early to call it a must-buy

AC Rally is a very good base to build on, but there’s simply not enough to do in it right now for it to be a must-have in your sim library.

At the time of writing, there are two locations with four stages to play with. Even the final version is only quoted as having just 120km of routes, owing to lengthy development times.

Combine that with a short car list for the time being, and it gets quite samey, quite fast. Its £24.99 asking price does reflect that, but if you’re hoping for hours upon end of reliability right now, you won’t find it here.

If content updates are kept consistent (not a given, as shown by AC Evo), it will eventually be a great of the genre. It just isn’t there yet.