Nostalgia is powerful. Also, stupid. No matter how faithful a re-release is to its source material, it’ll never conjure the meaningful experiences that made you fall in love with the original in the first place. Context is the worst of bugbears.
I have no deep connection to Remedy Entertainment’s top-down racer Death Rally, and I consider this a good thing. I can’t feel bitter about new design choices that replace the old ones; I can’t stomp around about wholesale exclusions; and I can’t whine about a lack of spirit. I’m not chasing the dragon looking for that original, glorious high.
Instead, I can just enjoy my extended look at the title, which plays like it was indeed created in 1996. The catch is that it holds up in the iOS arena.
At its heart, Death Rally is a top-down shooter featuring cars. Sure, there are laps, tracks, opponents, and a finish line: racing game trimmings. But the game, perhaps to its own detriment, only dishes out meaningful rewards for violence, for doing things like blowing up other cars or boxes in the road.
It’s a weird pretense, the racing, because it’s also the weakest part of the preview build I’ve been playing. The AI is programmed in an obvious way: two cars are faster than you, no matter what, while the rest of the pack is glacially slow or average speed. This puts you in the position of needing to kill the two pack leaders at the beginning of the race to win because, otherwise, they’ll just zoom ahead of you never to be caught up with. I’ve had many a race so far that consisted of, basically, just me going around a track three times after dismissing the slower cars. The fast cars tend to be so fast that they even left the camera’s field of view.
Also, the racing is just a matter of turning your car around turns without getting caught on geometry. There’s no nuance, no drifting, no power sliding, no split-second decisions.
But — and this is a big, tone-shifting kind of but — your car has guns. Shooting is a breeze and the weapons you’ll receive dish out the kind of satisfying damage you’d expect. Enemies will dish it out, too, so you have to be weary of your position and then prepare to best exploit a given situation, which makes for some interesting strategies. I, for example, often don’t take off on the starting line, just so I can more easily tackle the cars while they’re in a pile in front of me.
For starters, your car is equipped with a basic, auto-firing machine gun. As you play, you can unlock a rocket launcher, mines, a shotgun, and a Gatling gun. Additionally, you can level up all of these weapons, as well as speed, armor, and handling attributes on your car, by earning points in races.
These EXP-based systems feel familiar, but the grip is ever real: Death Rally does a great job at making you want to do just one more race for just one more upgrade. This, married with the action it endorses, makes for some entertaining play.
I think where Death Rally excels is in its personality. It’s got a mid-90s, southern developer beer-infused and grungy kind of vibe. It celebrates its violence and features many a brown tone, fire, broken objects, dingy environments and attitude, just like, say, Duke Nukem, a character who also appears in the game as an opponent.
I’m not sure if the racing issues are going to be hammered out by release. But these aren’t deal breakers — the shooting feels good, the action can be tight if you play your cards right, the transitions to the next race are snappy, and the upgrades will have their way with you. Death Rally is also pretty imaginative as far as iOS titles go, which I think goes a long way in keeping someone engrossed and entertained.
I may not have an emotional connection with the 1996 version of Death Rally, but I don’t want one. I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the game as much as I have with the retro baggage in tow, I’m sure. And, yeah, Death Rally might have some core problems with the racing, but everything else appears to be solid. I’ll be keeping my eyes on this one and we’ll definitely be talking about this one again when the full release rolls around.
