Rush Rally Switch Preview - Why play this over any other racer?
No, seriously, why would you?
On mobile, Rush Rally 3 is a decently attractive and interesting game. It aims to be a fairly realistic rally racing sim, one which sees you race down a selection of courses, making careful manoeuvres which are directed to you by your race manager. This is a game that takes itself seriously - a bit of a disappointment, as I was expecting something a bit more lighthearted, but it achieves what it aims for.
On mobile, this game is easily worth £3.99. You can pick it up on Google Play right now, and have a grand old time setting high scores and smash time trial leaderboards since there's no real multiplayer. But on Nintendo Switch, the game is closer to £11.99, and given the games it's up against, that is not a flattering value proposition.
Rush Rally 3 is a mobile game which is available right now, as stated, and as far as the mobile market goes, it's a decent, yet uninspiring racer.
The graphics aren't best in class, the controls aren't, the selection of tracks isn't either. But at the purchase price on mobile, it's worthwhile. Selling the game for three times the price on Nintendo Switch isn't such an attractive proposition, though.
It's still not bad. This is a good attempt at a realistic rally racer, and it feels good to master the controls of your vehicle and get good times. It'd be even nicer if there were an online multiplayer mode instead of just LAN, but we take what we can get. You can absolutely have fun with this, and in races the controls have been adapted to Switch nicely. But so much else has not.
The graphics, for one, are just not improved whatsoever. It does appear to hum along at a smooth framerate, for what it's worth, but it looks so incredibly bland. When pitted against other racers on Switch, like Asphalt 9: Legends, GRID Autosport, or even, heaven forbid, Mario Kart 9 Deluxe, Rush Rally 3 just looks old hat and not suited for the system. And that's a problem that perseveres.
I can ignore the absurd lack of local multiplayer - that's right, "LAN" only - even though it truly, truly, is an absurd thing to miss in a racing game on Nintendo Switch, and I can ignore the lack of online multiplayer, but the menus I cannot ignore. I just cannot.
Fit for purpose?Everything is, of course, built for mobile, and you can use the touchscreen in handheld mode too. If you're not doing that though, you move between options with this awkward hand-shaped cursor that hovers over the screen.
When you press a direction, you can never truly be sure which of the many on-screen buttons it'll land on, but you get an indication when it takes half a second to move across the screen. Yeah, that doesn't sound like long, but it's too long to navigate a single menu option.
This game launches on Nintendo Switch just two days before Christmas. Just two days! Now, I don't want to feel cynical or anything, but it really feels like a mobile developer ported one of their games to Nintendo Switch, overpriced it, and then lined it up for launch two days before children get their new consoles, hoping that they'll sell more copies on that busy day while their game sits in the New Releases section of the eshop. Does that sound cynical? Well, cynical it may be, but that is exactly what has happened here.
Rush Rally 3 should be cheaper, and it should be better adapted to the platform it sits on. Right now, saying it is an ill-fit is just the tip of the iceberg. As it stands, I just can't recommend it over any other racers on Nintendo Switch - but playing it on mobile isn't a terrible idea.
