Death Rally was originally released on DOS back in 1996. It was later ported to Windows as freeware and even later onto iOS and Android mobile platforms. The 2011 remake of this top-down racing game is now available on Steam and is looking better than ever.
The goal of Death Rally is the same as it’s always been—beat the Adversary. To do this, you have to compete in race after death-defying race to build your racing fleet and arsenal. In the amazingly long career mode, you’ll start with just a Vagabond (a tricked-out Beetle) and less than five hundred bucks. You earn cash by blowing up opponents, collecting in-race bonuses, achievements (such as fastest lap), and of course by winning races. You then use the cash for vehicles upgrades such as speed and armor.
Parts for new cars and weapons are randomly placed on the track and simply take running them over to collect. New vehicles, each with a balance of speed and durability upgrades, are unlocked when all of their parts are collected. Any time you destroy an opponent, they will also drop a part. Destroying others is not easy though. Each of your cars has an automatically-firing gun that can be used to blow someone up, but it usually takes focusing on that one car for multiple laps, not allowing you to focus on power-up collection or actually winning the race. The add-on weapons, such as the Gatling gun and mines, are much more suited for giving other racers a bad day.
Come at me, bro
The games quick races invite the ability to jump on and play for only a few minutes at a time. Great for players that can’t dedicate large chucks of play time. Randomly throughout your career, just before a race, you will receive a shady call that will offer to sabotage an opponent, give you some power-ups, or let you try out a fully-equipped vehicle that you don’t own yet in return for a cut of your winnings. You will also sometimes be given the challenge of taking out a fellow racer to double your prize—but if you fail, a percentage of it is taken away. Some of these options are advantageous but others are very difficult, such as destroying a fully-equipped opponent in a single lap one-on-one race.
There is a storyline to Death Rally, but even with career mode easily taking more than twenty hours to complete, it comes off rather distant from the game play. While you essentially race on the same tracks over and over, the different directions and game modes keep it dynamic enough that racing game fans will get their monies’ worth. Others may feel that the game play is just simply too grindy.
If you are used to controlling a PC racer with the arrow keys while using your left hand to fire or use power-ups, then the default control set may work for you. Others who are used to WASD or other setups should take a moment to change the controls, which can easily be done from the options screen. My personal setup used WASD for control and acceleration and the 1, 2 and 3 on the number pad to fire my weapon, drop a mine and use a nitro boost. The handling of each vehicle in-game is a little wonky at first, but gets tighter and easier to control as you go. Players will quickly memorize the tracks and be able to drift around turns and hit shortcuts with ease.
If you are even remotely interested in Death Rally, or just want a throw back to this 90’s classic, I recommend picking this one up when it inevitably gets discounted during a Steam sale. Shouldn’t be too long before you can get this one for $4.99 or so.
Death Rally is available now on Steam for PC.
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