Video Games: This indie rally racer charts a new path through the cosmos

By Edward Brydalski
(Image above: Exo Rally Championship poster. Game & art by Exbleative and Future Friends Games.)

Exo Rally Championship is a forward-thinking take on an often overlooked game genre: rally racing¹. Exo Rally Championship retains the roots of what makes its genre work while pushing the gameplay experience far into the future, both through its setting and advanced mechanics. 

You play as a green-as-grass driver signing up with a down-and-out racing team. The goal is to win enough races to restore the team’s clout in the intergalactic racing circuit. 

But it won’t be as simple as turning left at Talladega. You’re racing super powerful all-terrain buggies across the wild landscapes of alien planets and moons, each one with unique looks and obstacles.

Behold the mud flats of New Earth. These barren and pitted landscapes dotted with superstructures are some of the most hospitable you will see in the Exo Rally Circuit.

New Earth is a familiarly green and brown vista filled with evergreens and signs of human terraforming. Planet Tensei has significantly lower gravity, looser ground, taller hills, and frequent earthquakes that never fail to mess with your handling. Several more planets abound, getting more and more dangerous.

Races can even get deadly. Fall off a sheer cliff face or get struck by a meteorite and your driver may not make it to the next stage.

Planet Dhool’s micrometeorite showers really are dangerous. Thankfully, your rover’s HUD² offers real-time impact tracking, so you can change your path on the fly.

Thankfully, your rover is well-equipped for the task. At any time, you can activate boosters to change your pitch and roll on the fly. All but the slowest rovers are outfitted with jump boosters, allowing for a quick vertical boost to make it over a pool of strange green liquid or cushion an unexpected fall off a sheer cliff face. Just don’t use too much or you might run out of fuel before your next pit stop.

These threats aren’t unfairly thrown at you. The game gives you the chance to map out your route ahead of the race by way of a recon drone. 

This race on Planet Tensei had a tricky start involving this sharp ridgeline.I used my drone to place some red danger markers along the crest so I knew when to break to safely gap it.

You can fly the drone across the landscape, placing markers and lines that you will see during the race. It’s a great way to point out obstacles, note grippy terrain and admire the scenery of these alien landscapes. Just be careful not to crash it, unless you want to find out the hard way what lies past a checkpoint at the top of a hill.

For the very prepared among us, Exo Rally Championship offers extensive tuning³ possibilities for your rover. Change brake bias, suspension travel for each wheel — almost any option you can find in a simulation racer is here. But if you’re as impatient as I am, you can get away just fine with changing the tires and calling it a race.

Lots of flashing lights on my rover’s dashboard after this crash on Planet Dhool.You’d be surprised how stealthy a massive landscape of boulders can be when you’re going 150 MPH.

Damage is also tracked just as fastidiously. Crashing can damage tires, wheels and suspension components. Like a real rally, you’ll need to fix this stuff in the field and on a strict time limit. Chances to repair and refuel only come once every two or three stages, so living fast and dying hard isn’t always a practical option.

The game’s most difficult rover seems to pay homage to real world Dakar Rally: The Mining Class.

Ever seen a building drift?

The massive space dump trucks feel as weighty as the 10-ton behemoths that speed across the Sahara Desert each year. All that bulk makes them extra durable, but way too heavy to support boosters. You need to be extra careful not to flip your rig and get stranded on a hostile alien world.

The danger of what it is you’re doing every time you start a race is hammered home from the moment you boot up the game.

No buts about it: participating in these races is stupid, pointless, and life-threateningly dangerous. Why do it at all?

The title screen shows a wrecked, smoking rover in a desolate landscape with no help in sight. In the very first conversation with your racing team manager, he reminisces about losing a former teammate and friend in an Exo Rally accident years prior; it’s still eating at him to this day. 

It’s a danger not too dissimilar to what real-world rally racers face every time they strap into their race cars. A pine tree and a micro-meteorite hardly feel different once you reach 80 miles per hour.

Spending time in Free Roam sprinting across an alien landscape is an oddly peaceful experience. The lovely droning score certainly adds to the atmosphere.

Exo Rally Championship offers a variety of game modes. The expected championships, single races and time trials are here. Plus there are daily races across procedurally generated⁴ tracks. You could even generate tracks yourself and customize them in the stage editor. 

Peer-to-peer⁵ multiplayer is available for private friend groups. You can share a lobby code to take part in asynchronous⁶ timed races.

These are the same game, just 28 years apart. (Colin McRae Rally for PS1 (Left), Exo One Championship for PC (Right))

Twice upon a time, a series of rally racing games made waves across the gaming landscape. First it was the Colin McRae Rally series on the PlayStation 1, and a couple decades later with its spiritual successor, the Dirt series on XBOX 360 and PS3. Each game had its own merits and feel, but (barring some exceptions) they all retained the throughline of rugged, offroad, “The only things I answer to are The Clock and God” style racing.

Exo Rally Championship is to rally racing what Halo was to the first person shooters of the early 2000s (and no, not because they’re set in space.) They represent paradigm shifts of the mechanical underpinnings of their genres, while maintaining the spirit and fun of what came before. 

I’m wholly excited to see what new frontiers this developer explores next.

It’s difficult to convey with still images, but the sense of speed is fantastic. 152 MPH really feels like it, especially with a row of alien conifers just seconds away from splitting you in half.

Exo Rally Championship is available now exclusively on Steam for $24.99.

No plans for console ports have yet been announced.

Official teaser trailer:

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Glossary

1: Rally racing is a genre of auto racing involving off-road-capable cars racing across rural roads and dirt paths with the goal of completing a sprint in as short a time as possible.

2: HUD is an acronym for Heads Up Display. HUDs display relevant information on a screen or hologram in front of the user’s face.

3:Tuning is the process of customizing elements of a vehicle to suit a certain task. This can include changing the rigidity of suspension components or altering properties of the engine for higher performance or longevity.

4: Procedural map generation refers to a method of game level creation that uses algorithms and game logic to create levels and terrains without requiring direct input from a developer.

5: Peer-to-peer multiplayer refers to online games that rely on direct connections between players, rather than developer-hosted servers.

6: Asynchronous multiplayer is a method of gameplay where multiple players play together, but not necessarily at the same time. The results of their gameplay impact each other, but not directly. In the case of Exo Rally Championship, each player races on the same track under the same conditions, but cannot interact with each other’s rovers during the race.

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