Exo Rally Championship

Дата публикации: 06-07-2026 09:00:00

Let me start with a confession. I love rallying; I've played pretty much everything since Colin McRae came to the PlayStation, and I've even lined up on the starting grid myself in the Swedish Esports Championship for Dirt Rally. I finished in a modest 55th place out of 365 entrants, mainly because I didn't have time to practice the stages, but that says something about the level I'm judging from. So when I launched the Exo Rally Championship, I did the first thing any rally nerd does: I tried to plug in the steering wheel. It took half a moment to realise it wasn't going to work. This game is designed for a controller, where the left stick steers and the right handles the thrusters to balance the car in the air. My first, slightly heretical thought was that a rally game without a steering wheel doesn't really feel like rallying. But that's because this isn't, at its core, a rally game.
Behind the game is the Australian three-man studio Exbleative, led by Jay Weston, who previously created the indie-acclaimed Exo One, with Future Friends Games as the publisher and Unity under the bonnet. It's marketed as a "brutally realistic simulator" where you drive RCS-thruster-equipped rovers between waypoints on procedurally generated routes. The very word "waypoints" reveals what it really is. With its dual-stick controls, it reminds me more of a motocross game than a rally game: you don't follow a marked route but make your way from gate-to-gate, reading the terrain yourself in between. Think Dakar, think the early MX games.
The atmosphere is spot on. Before each race, you roll up to the starting line, carry out a system check, and await the go-ahead from your crew before the drones count down and send you on your way. It's a small detail, but the whole ritual shows that someone has put some thought into it. Between events, your team principal and race engineer talk to you over the radio in a way that brings to mind Metal Gear Solid and Snake's codec. And the engineer isn't just window dressing as on certain stages, the team warns you about meteors striking the ground, complete with their locations and a countdown timer, as an impact can smash vital parts and throw you off balance.
<bild>A pre-race chat with your team manager before the start, which brings to mind {Metal Gear Solid}.</bild>
This is where I made my big mistake the first time I tried the game. The only vehicle you have from the start is a light, front-wheel-drive 255-horsepower UTV, which is sluggish, stable, and anything but lively, and in my naivety I thought that was all the game had to offer. That's not true. The UTV is a deliberate entry-level vehicle designed to teach you how to move the vehicle forwards using the accelerator and brake without overcorrecting with the air suspension. A curious feature is that, despite its FF designation, it rears up on its rear wheels and clearly drifts backwards, which goes against the spec sheet.
You unlock the rest of the vehicles simply by completing the driving school, where you learn the manoeuvres each vehicle is capable of. If you win an event or rally, you get absolutely nothing in return, as there's no upgrade system and no variants to build. Good or bad? I'll come back to that. The EXO4 is a 4WD machine with just over a thousand horsepower that feels like a classic WRC car, complete with a dump valve, turbo sound, and considerably more life in the corners. The top-of-the-range model is the EXO6, a lightweight 6WD machine that handles like a dream. With around 925 horsepower per tonne, it has more than twice the power-to-weight ratio of the EXO4. Now we're talking. It's fast, lively, and fun to drive, and above all, you get access to the full range of air-based weapons.
Then there's the MINING, the monster dumper that felt like a gimmick even back in driving school. Give it a miss. Six tonnes and a wheelbase of nearly eight metres, no air tanks at all, and an experience like a bad monster truck game: it's fragile, slow, top-heavy, and prone to rolling over. Small stones, more like gravel, are enough to puncture it and the scale of the planet suddenly feels off, especially if you end up on your back, as you're lying there like a beetle and have to input a combo on the D-pad, Helldivers 2-style, to call for a rescue with a time penalty, of course. Not for me.
It's when I take the EXO6 to the lava planet Fusang that everything clicks into place. You can hear the car sizzling as you drive over the lava, ash drips from the sky and obscures your vision, and every now and then rocks and debris fly from the volcanoes, which is an extra thing to keep an eye on. Here, with a vehicle that can push forward, reverse, and rotate sideways in the air - and not just up, down, and roll as before - you can send the car into almost anything and save the day at the last second. It's bloody difficult, but so rewarding when it goes right. This is what the game was built for and now I'm impressed.
The variety between the planets really makes a difference. It's raining and there's fog, the heat is sweltering, lava and meteors pose a threat, and ash reduces visibility. The tracks play freely with elevation changes and different surfaces, giving you that rally-style feeling of reading the terrain and constantly adapting.
<bild>The driving school prepares you to steer (manoeuvre) the game's spacecraft.</bild>
And then comes the hangover. I spoke too soon about the air supply as I'd hoped the larger cars would be generous with the thruster, but you can only refuel every fourth stage instead of every other one. So you have to hold back even more than I'd thought, and your crew members keep nagging you to conserve fuel and only use it in an emergency. It's a mechanic the developer clearly wants to stick with, and sure, the Ultra-Torque Wheels system mitigates this by providing pitch control via the throttle and brakes alone (accelerate and the nose rises, brake and it dives), which saves air. But the core issue remains.
My honest opinion is that the balance would have benefited from more readily available air. It's such a big part of what makes the game fun, and the title just gets harder and less forgiving the further you get. The World Federation of Ascetics and Sadomasochists will no doubt praise it exactly as it is, but an ordinary, poor gamer with a thirty-second attention span might not want to do fifteen restarts just to get round the first track. A bit more fuel for the throttle adjustments and more frequent pit stops would have done the trick.
The main mechanic is damage and repairs, not rewinds. There's no rewind like in Forza, as if you crash, you have to live with the consequences, and on higher difficulty levels you can't even restart the rally. That's why I call it the Dark Souls of racing games, where every time you choose to go for it, you have to weigh up the risk against the reward. My advice is to switch on restarts because you need to be able to grind to build up your own reference bank. The 94 per cent difficulty level is a real sweet spot: just the right balance to make you work hard and take risks for a podium finish.
The track design is solid. Each stage has eight events and the progression is logical; the first few are a breeze, whilst the later ones require five to ten restarts to find the right lines. A fun detail is that the tracks use banking, meaning the terrain slopes into the bend. The worst are the uphill bends because even the heavier cars feel like a boat that takes a hundred years to turn. I'm torn about the set-up though. The range of settings is enormous, but the more I fiddle away from the default, the worse it gets. If you raise the ride height, the centre of gravity shifts so much that the car wants to tip over, and during a lunar challenge I actually lowered the car instead so I could turn at all, whereupon the barely existent gravity launched me several tens of metres into the air and caused the suspension to bottom out. The default is quite simply a balanced sweet spot, and there's more simulator depth on paper than feels intuitive in practice.
Herein lies the game's big question. Once you've completed all the rallies, what do you do then? There are four vehicles, no variants, no upgrades, and no upgrade system whatsoever. No dopamine rush to lure you on. In a way, it's actually refreshing as you're never forced to do tedious tasks just to enjoy what you came for, but it also means that the only thing keeping you hooked is the joy of the driving itself. Multiplayer only helps to a limited extent: as far as I can tell, you have to team up with friends who own the game since there's no matchmaking. You can chase good online times and build tracks in the stage editor to share with mates, but there's no long-term appeal.
<bild>Here we have the game's most fun car (EXO6), which is about to be driven out for inspection before the start.</bild>
The sound is below average. The engine sounds aren't impressive: the UTV and MINING don't give me that thrill, the EXO4 has a bit of character with its dump valve and turbo, and the EXO6 sounds perfectly fine, like a fast but suspiciously eco-friendly racing car. This is coming from a bloke who used to listen to motorbike engine sounds on the CDs handed out by motorbike magazines, so I know what character should sound like, and this is flat. The crew's robotic voice handles the GPS and vehicle status, mostly shouting out distances, damage, and low fuel levels, whilst the music in the menus and before races is all the more atmospheric.
The graphics are perfectly fine. The tracks aren't exactly lively, but they do the job with good variety, and the cars move in a way that inspires confidence and gives a sense of physics simulation.
And then there's the nerdy bit. Calling it a genuine simulator is a bit of a stretch, when a front-wheel-drive car rears up on its rear wheels and the default setup is the only way to avoid rolling over. It's a bit like bowling with lane guards: as long as you don't upset the balance, it rolls along nicely, but the freedom is an illusion. Incidentally, I was christened Juha Koski in the game, and no, the studio isn't Finnish, it's based in Adelaide, but it's a nice nod to rally's "Flying Finns".
Now for the factual question I promised to sort out: can an internal combustion engine run on an alien planet without oxygen? The answer is no. A standard internal combustion engine needs oxygen as an oxidiser, and on the Moon - where the game itself states the air density is zero - there's no atmospheric oxygen to burn with. It would need to carry its own oxidiser, like a rocket, just to move around, and in a vacuum, no sound travels outwards anyway. The game does, admittedly, muffle the engine on the Moon (a nice little nod) but the rumble is still there. For a title that calls itself brutally realistic, it's a tiny minor flaw, with a twinkle in its eye.
I'm genuinely impressed that a three-man studio has managed to put together this whole package into an original and innovative take on rallying. It's in the gameplay where it really shines: the feel of the driving and the mechanics that elevate the game, particularly in EXO4 and EXO6. Their biggest mistake, as I see it, is hiding the most fun tools behind a stingy fuel gauge and presenting them as emergency equipment. There's another level to reach here, but the game doesn't quite make it all the way.
The value lies almost entirely in the experience of playing the game, as the replay value is weak. If you've got a few spare quid and fancy trying something unique, like a mayfly that, with a bit of luck, might survive a week, then this is the game for you. If you're looking for something to hold onto in the longer term, this probably isn't it. The only thing that might extend its lifespan is if an esports scene were to emerge around the game, but I consider that unlikely. Admittedly, there's a steering wheel and a first-person view, but both are too impractical to support a competitive scene: controlling the thrusters with the steering wheel is a feat in itself; the first-person view is the wrong perspective when the car does a triple somersault and you're trying to save the landing, and above all, you drive more slowly that way.
<bild>A planet that can lead to a hot temper.</bild>
Footnote: This review is based on the version I played up until mid-June. Since the test period, the game has received two updates (June 15 and 25) addressing several of my concerns, including revamped vehicle sounds and new UTV engine sounds, a new online rally browser with filters to find races, and the ability to customise rules such as restarts regardless of difficulty level. I haven't tested these updates, so this review reflects the game as it was before.

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