With the new year in full swing I am still in the mood for local multiplayer party games (I always am to be honest) and so Rallyallyally coming out just before Christmas was peak party alignment time. It is a game that has a very sharp focus on providing quickfire laughs and rage inducing last minute steals as it provides a nuanced take on capture the flag.
1-8 players can take part in a game of Rallyallyally as a mixture of real players and very challenging bots. You are placed onto a single world map made up of chunky and colourful lo-poly styled graphics depicting the world as a field of rally but there are no laps or tracks to speak of. Instead there are various checkpoint islands dotted around the map and the idea is that you need roll out the road to which checkpoint you fancy racing towards. You do this like a capture the flag game. The player who pushes the road out like a dog nosing a ball is in charge and owns the road and as they change the direction, the road does too. The idea is that whomever rolls the road into the checkpoint zone scores 6 points. The next few cars in afterwards score 4, 2 and 1 point and everyone else playing gets nothing. You then reset and go off charging again. After three rounds whomever has the most points wins. Its a racing game but it never feels like one, instead its more like a tactical sabotage game running at high speed.
The player in charge of the road is places at a disadvantage because rolling out the road slows you down a bit. This means that unless you are weaving around everywhere, the other players will catch you up and ram you out the way. Doing so means you lose the road and someone else can take control. There are also weapon boxes everywhere full of punching gloves, rockets, boosters and oil slicks to cause traps ala your favourite karting games to get in the way. As its a single screen game, the camera zooms out a bit but anyone that falls off the screen gets a healthy boost back into the frame again. It is helpful enough to be a genuine tactic sometimes because you can steam in when everyone else is ramming each other and steal the road from under their noses.
Indeed, this is what Rallyallyally usually descends into, especially with more than 4 players. It is utter chaos and whilst that is fun for a short while, anyone who does well early in a round will usually be screaming at the screen in agony but the end of it. This is because its almost a disadvantage to have control of the road when approaching a checkpoint. A quick boost or punch right before the end usually means a last two second before the line steal and it feels a bit cheap and unfair. Other times it can descend into some clunky feeling ramming when players are less familiar with gaming.
Some of these complaints could be remedied by some game options but Rallyallyally comes with no options to change at all. You can randomly generate a car shape and colour but you can’t alter the amount of rounds per game, the points system or whether weapons are or off (or which ones). There is also only the one map which is very green making playing as a green car quite hard on the eyes. Whilst the single map is unfortunate, the inability to customise round set up is a real shame as its low hanging fruit that could add some variation to the game. As a three round game can be over in literally 90 seconds, the high octane thrills and spills burn so brightly, so fast that the game is best played in short doses only. Since the AI is so well done in this game, I’d have welcomed a teams mode too.
There is a lot of fun to be had with Rallyallyally but know going in that it is designed to slightly enrage players and that the gameplay is extremely one note. Its succinct scope is initially one of its biggest strengths but it also hurts its long term replayability too. Keep it in short spurt rotation to get the most love from it. Then you’ll want to roll out the red carpet for it most times your friends come over.
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