This is my favorite casual racing game. It's easy enough that you don't need a racing wheel to do well, yet challenging enough that you'll still be learning new ways to improve your times long after beating the career mode.

The career mode progression through various classes of rally racing really helps you gradually acclimate to the faster classes of cars. I also really like that there's more rewards for not burning up your restarts. The rewards for not using resets are only cosmetic, so you're not missing out on vehicles if you do use restarts, but it's a nice incentive to not immediately reach for the restart button every time you make a minor mistake. For me at least, having that extra incentive helped put me in the mindset of adapting to my own mistakes, rather than striving for the perfect run every single time as I went through career mode.

On the topic of striving for perfect runs though: time trials are a fantastic way to try for those perfect runs. I only checked out time trials after beating the career mode, but it's been quite fun challenging myself to beat my own ghosts in time trials mode, and doing so adds a lot of replayability.

Art Of Rally is very simplistic at the surface. It's just you and your car versus the track and times (allegedly set by "AI" opponents you never see). But all the cars do handle differently, so it's worth figuring out which you like the feel of. The gameplay settings let you tune the driving experience to just the right balance between arcade and "sim" feel, so you can get just the driving challenge you want. And nobody would say this is a real "sim", but it does tap into the same locked-in zen focus state I liked from real sims. It's like a minimalist, controller friendly, much calmer sim-lite *experience*

Not for everyone, but unique and excellent at the thing it's doing.

It's good, I like the miniature pov, and the cars handle pretty well, the tracks are well made, and it does give you that rally feeling without requiring you to fork your life savings for a shiny gpu.