Hello everybody and welcome back to another game review. Today we’re looking at Super Woden: Rally Edge, an indie rally racing game released by ViJuDa only about three months ago. If you’ve been following the racing game scene for any length of time, you know that retro-based racing games have been on its own kick for a few years now. As a result of that, we got two games that I’ve covered previously, Victory Heat Rally and Old School Rally. Victory Heat Rally was a game that I absolutely loved, but Old School Rally left me disappointed.
Super Woden: Rally Edge is actually part of a franchise of other games. Super Woden is essentially a top-down reimagining of Gran Turismo right down to the menu being based on the PS1 games. I’ve never played the two mainline games, but I have been aware of them for quite a while. In a move that I can only assume was at least subconsciously inspired by Assetto Corsa Rally, ViJuDa made a rally spinoff of Super Woden. While the first two games are niche, if not outright obscure, Rally Edge in particular has managed to cement itself somewhat within the indie racing scene. As of right now, it has more Steam reviews than either of the first two games combined in about a tenth of the time that the second one has been out.
Does this favor better than Old School Rally? Well, since you can already see the title of this review, you already know the answer, but let's dive deeper into it.
Not Exactly Gran Turismo, Is it?
If this main menu screen looks familiar, the game also has a car acquisition screen and car livery option inspired by Ridge Racer Type 4.
Super Woden: Rally Edge is an arcade rally game, and as such, it uses the arcade-y “easy”, “medium”, and “hard” pace note system like Old School Rally. I’m probably going to sound like a broken record by the end of this review with how many comparisons I draw to that game. On the surface, it looks like it communicates a lot of what you’d expect from a typical indie rally racer. In fact, I think the menu up top communicates pretty much everything you need. The game has a structured career mode in which you buy cars of different classes to compete in each event. The progression system in this game is very Gran Turismo-esque.
And that philosophy is carried over into its Workshop feature, allowing you to tune and maintain your car. As is the case in Gran Turismo, tuning your cars is something you do because you want to, not because you have to, but it’s a great addition to optimize your setup. Car maintenance is actually quite important in this game. Copying another page right out of Gran Turismo is the option to wash your car and change its oil. In Gran Turismo, these features technically do something, but you’re not really penalized for ignoring it entirely, whereas in this game, the car maintenance actually feels quite important (unless that happens to be a placebo effect).
Beyond that, you have an Arcade mode which basically makes the game play like a Sega Rally Championship clone in which you have to make it to each checkpoint before the time runs out. You also have Seasonal Events that rotate every few days and will get you a measly amount of cash, which can actually be quite significant in the early game. The career will also occasionally have you compete in Super Special Stages, which is a feature strangely absent in Old School Rally, and Gymkhana events to break up the monotony a little bit.
Forests, Mountains, and PLAINS, OH My!
If you can't see the bottom of the pit, then there isn't one.
In a rather stark deviation from the original two games, Rally Edge does not default to the franchise’s traditional top-down camera view (although that is an option if you want to play that way), but instead opts for a more angled view that strikes somewhat of a halfway point in-between the top-down camera and a more standard chase camera. If you’re familiar with Art of Rally, that game actually uses a more zoomed out version of what this uses. Supposedly, you can actually unlock a proper chase camera by entering the Konami Code at the boot up screen, but even when I entered the code correctly, I couldn’t access the cheat menu to do this.
A problem I had with Old School Rally was the fact that the game as a whole felt incredibly empty because the stages didn’t really have anything to look at (other than the road) and there was no proper competition. Both of these are issues that absolutely do not exist in this game. Stages in Rally Edge feel alive and are a joy to look at. As you can probably see in the screenshot above me, there is a lot of character to all the stages put in. Driving over every bridge and jump feels exciting when the surrounding scenery also feels exciting.
Difficulty in Old School Rally was practically non-existent if you don’t count the wacky default driving physics, which is another problem that doesn’t exist in Super Woden: Rally Edge. The game isn’t super difficult, but you can exactly afford to fuck up either. All the stages left me with a satisfying amount of challenge where I could reasonably complete each stage if I drove well enough, but I did have to give it my all sometimes.
Past Millennium, HD/Colorized
The Delta has reached the Stratos-phere.
Just like Old School Rally, this game takes the approach of taking real life rally cars, changing their names, and making absolutely no attempt to disguise what the cars are based off of. One of the best features of Old School Rally was its impressive car list. The car list in Super Woden: Rally Edge has some omissions from Old School Rally (no Skoda Octavia or Peugeot 307 in this game for instance), but is overall a stronger car list than that game. Predictably from the atmosphere of the game, the car list is mostly about celebrating old rally cars from decades past, focusing on rally cars in between the 1960s and the 1990s. You’ve got old legends like the Mini Cooper S and the Abarth 131, and that goes up to the iconic Subaru Impreza and Toyota Corolla. Of course, they’re not actually called those in the game, but you can edit the names of the cars you buy if you want the immersion.
However, as impressive as the car list in the game is, there’s very little incentive to actually use most of the vehicles in the game since every event in the game allows every car of a particular class. For example, every E-class event allows for every E-class car, every D-class event allows for every D-class car, and this is true for every other class in the game. This means that once you obtain a car for a particular class, you don’t really need to buy other cars in that class because you can partake in every event of that class with that car, and it’ll be competitive enough to win it because everyone’s on roughly equal footing.
The game visually is really charming. There’s a sense of capturing the nostalgic feeling of old arcade racers, though in a different sense than Old School Rally did. No glitchy squares, and no mountains that seem to grow and shrink in real time as soon as you get close to them. The music direction is also surprisingly different from Old School Rally. Normally, an arcade racer capturing this type of nostalgia would go for a mix of hard rock and drum’n’bass, but the soundtrack of Super Woden: Rally Edge is much more electronic-based. That said, the music in this game was quite enjoyable, and it accomplished its goal of getting me pumped for each race.
Don't Break the Car, Samir!
Impossibly strong stones are part of every road safety code.
You may remember in my Old School Rally review, how I mentioned that the driving physics of that game were very slippery unless you went in and manually changed them. The physics in Super Woden: Rally Edge are much better. They are a bit heavier than you might expect, and it takes some deliberate effort before your car will actually start to turn, but they were easy to get used to, and throwing the car around turns is very fun.
One thing that you will have to learn very quickly though is that your car will slow down heavily, unrealistically so, if any wheels are off the road, almost as if everything other than the road is made of molasses. This isn’t really a problem so much as it is a challenge, but it does become slightly problematic with the way collisions are handled. If you hit a wall, your car will bounce off in the opposite direction and slow down to a crawl, no matter what the speed or the angle of the impact was. On narrow roads, this sometimes leads to a “pinball” effect where you will bounce off of one wall right into another over and over. This game effectively teaches you to stay on the road as much as you can. You can total your car entirely, but it’s pretty much impossible to do this without doing it on purpose, so you won’t have to worry about it.
Your co-driver is much more reliable in this game than the one in Old School Rally, but she still isn’t perfect. She will sometimes call tight turns “easy” even though they definitely should’ve been mediums. This is nowhere near as egregious as it was in Old School Rally, but you will still have to rely a lot on your own intuition over just your co-driver and the camera angle means you need to be able to have good reaction time, but I found that they gave you just enough room ahead.
Rally Reception
It even has the elusive blue one too!
Overall, what is my opinion on Super Woden: Rally Edge. It might seem a bit hard to judge at this moment since I’ve shared a lot of positive and negative aspects of the game. Despite my criticisms, Rally Edge is a very enjoyable game. As an indie arcade rally game, it is considerably better than Old School Rally. The driving is better, the progression is better, and the content it makes use of is better.
The biggest problem I have with the game is that there’s simply not enough of it. It took me a grand total of only 8 hours to unlock every achievement, earn every gold trophy in the game, and take all the screenshots in this review, and that time also accounts for the number of times I had to retry an event because I didn’t complete it on my first try. I definitely could've completed it even faster.
Pros
Great car list.
Charming soundtrack and art style that hits the nostalgic beats to a tee.
Fun driving physics and great stage designs.
Cons
Despite its impressive car list, the game doesn't make the most of it.
Very short length.
Shut Up and Take My Money!
There's no right and wrong side of the road. There's a right and left one.
As of this review, Super Woden: Rally Edge is only available on Steam, but just like Old School Rally, I wouldn't discount the possibility of console releases later down the line.
It's a great game though. If its short length doesn't bother you, then you'll love it a lot. It's definitely a lot better than Old School Rally. Is it better than Victory Heat Rally? That's a bit of a harder one to answer.
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