“Hair raising drives” – Colin McRae Rally 2.0

Colin McRae Rally came at the right moment around rallying’s peak interest in the UK, and threaded a superb path between realism and accessible enjoyability. It offered a more-authentic-than-ever version of rallying which nonetheless didn’t involve any of the real stages of the championship it was based on. That was a pragmatic decision to not just make its development easier but also let you complete a rally in a fraction of the driving time of a real one, never mind all the hanging about in between, and it was a good one. Being in that pseudo-real lacuna also left its sequel in an interesting position.

Codemasters had something that worked brilliantly, but they really couldn’t rely on enough fans of the sport being captured by an update to a new season alone. Indeed, they sidestepped much of that by having you race mostly against fictional drivers, although oddly you can also select to play as almost any of the championship’s real drivers. Instead, they overhauled the menu presentation in an impressively thorough way, but otherwise confidently retrenched everything good about the first game. The 2.0 in the title is a very of-the-time affectation (Garbage released their album Version 2.0 a couple of years earlier) but it totally fits. This is the same thing, but different and better, upgrade and sequel combined. There is a new arcade racing mode, but it’s a sideshow curiosity and is treated like it.

Over in the main rally, any tweaks to the driving aren’t particularly noticeable but it didn’t need much; it feels great again. The handling is perfectly pitched, twitchy enough to hover at the edge of control but be tameable, and the camera lags behind the swing of the car just-so to make sliding round corners a visual joy. The competitive process is once again engaging, too. You have to finish in the top six to proceed to the next rally and on both my first two rallies I sat sixth going into the last few stages and was watching my placing against Tizot with every passing timing gate, painstakingly chasing down fractions of a second. And, in the final stage of the opening rally in Finland, doing so was an experience of total concentration. 

Between 1998 and 2000, some of the rallies in the World Rally Championship changed, and Colin McRae Rally didn’t feature the whole calendar or the real order anyway. Even where Colin McRae Rally 2.0 features the same settings as its predecessor, though, it’s not confined to the same stages. Codemasters could, and did, invent a whole new set of invented courses. They are more naturalistic than the first game’s, including a wider variety of lengths with some very short stages, and even less of a sense of a visibly authored narrative. That reflects an earned confidence. 

For the rally of Greece, a set of stages where the hillside drops away at the outside of hairpins is enough without added trickery. For Finland, the whole rally consists of relatively simple flat corners, but with narrow trees at the roadside throughout. Catch one of them wrong and get spun around horribly. The one twist which it throws in is a realistic, fair, and horrible one, which is that for the final stage you have to do the same thing… in the dark. I adopted an ultra-cautious style, counting the numbers with dread, and when I dropped five seconds but still managed to stay just ahead of Tizot the relief was incredible.

As much as the game shines even brighter than its predecessor in moments like that, there has to be a note of caution for hazards ahead. Codemasters had once again placed their rally vehicle perfectly, but they were on a narrowing road. Without a mass-audience sport to steer new players their way, they were bound to be particularly subject to the bumps of series fatigue as they moved into further entries, and traction was likely to get increasingly hard to come by. For now, though, Colin McRae Rally 2.0 was another rapid triumph.

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Top of the charts for week ending 10 June 2000:

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