By Martin Kingsley

Richard Burns is one of those 'safety first' types who daytime drives with the lights one. Pffft...

The problem with realism is that, well, it's realistic. Unlike the movies, driving a high-performance automobile into a power pole will put the hurt on you, and, unlike reality, being hit by plasma death rays from Mars will only decrease your health by twelve points and result in a flesh wound easily bandaged by the predictably buxom heroine.

Sometimes we crave the ability to do and be things we normally couldn't in our everyday lives and, on other occasions, we just want to be Superman on crack.

Richard Burns Rally is most definitely designed with the former in mind. With an emphasis on forcing you to learn the ways of the Impreza WRC and rigidly conform to the laws of gravity, it's not for the casual rally boy/girl/tentacle monster, unlike the Colin McRae series, which walks the fine line between realism and arcade fun mongering.

Indeed, those looking for a quick and easy rally fix until the next McRae are strongly advised to look elsewhere, for reasons disclosed below. So keep reading, people, you'll get there eventually.

In the first thirty seconds of RBR, you are confronted with a choice: learn the not so basics in Rally School mode or head for the track in the hope of setting some records. Should you ignore the game's many warnings to School yourself, you will likely find that most attempts at record-breaking will end with all four wheels spinning in the air.

It's not as easy as it looks on the TV.

This understood, Rally School teaches you everything, from the basics of car control, high speed braking and handbrake turns to the 'Scandinavian Flick' and taking tight corners at breakneck pace with soft-as-silk suspension, and, unlike certain other games, the tutelage given (voiced by the titular Dick Burns, teehee) doesn't condescend, instead trying simply to tell it as it is.

Plainly put, it's a godsend, and trying to do without it is ill advised at the best of times.

Having learnt what it takes to keep a Subaru from jack-knifing into the scrub at 150km/h, you can now go for a drive around all the usual rally locations handpicked from across England, Aussie-Land, Japan and the US, all replicated (so I am told) in excellent detail.

As far as actual rallying goes, RBR holds up particularly well…for the most part, and I say this because there is one specific characteristic in which it fails and that is in the area of control.

Though Richard Burns drove a Subaru Impreza, gamers can drive other cars, such as the 206

The PS2 controller, with its pressure sensitive buttons and overly touchy analogue sticks manages, almost single-handedly, to take all the weight out of controlling your automobile of choice and (to put it bluntly) unless you happen to have a racing wheel lying about, you will quickly come to realise that driving a rally car does not, cannot, feel like this.

On the other hand, playing with the wheel allows everything to gel nicely and one can get down to the real business of beating the very nearly but not quite unassailable times set by Richard-bloody-Burns.

In an almost literal sense, RBR is the ultimate mixed bag as far as visuals are concerned, falling somewhere between 'reasonable' and 'very nice indeed', with mediocre road textures, pleasant foliage, sparsely decorated tracks and a great set of car models (complete with deformable meshes and layered dust decals).

When you get right down to it, though, most of you don't buy games in order to stare in amazement at the arse end of a Toyota, right? [Wrong again - Ed]

The sound does it's job without much in the way of fanfare, and my only complaint is that some of the engine effects are so quiet whilst driving that you can barely hear them even in replay.

I mean, seriously, slamming a dirt chewing four-wheeled monster around the forests of Northern England should equate to the kind of heavy-duty noise pollution normally associated with Godzilla stomping downtown Tokyo.

Interestingly, observing people play RBR for the first time is akin to being present at the convening of a habitual masochist's conference, in that you'll screw up again and again and again, but will end up coming back for more until, eventually, you have the beast tamed.

For those lacking in fortitude, however, it's just a pain in the backside, nothing more and nothing less. In other words, we have a game that epitomises realism over mainstream appeal, but at what cost?

Richard Burns Rally will alienate some people with its high degree of difficulty and need for consistent perfection, yet those who stick around and persevere will find a surprisingly satisfying game beneath all the frustration.

Game: Richard Burns Rally
System: PS2
Players: 1-4
Online: No
Developer: Warthog
Distributor: Atari

Rating: 80%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Richard Burns Rally is on the shelves now.