Super Woden Rally Edge is a must-have rally game with a caveat!

While nostalgia is definitely a core ingredient, Super Woden Rally Edge is up to date with contemporary standards. The game looks great, sounds great, and feels great! The driving is on the arcade-y side, but there's some depth, and the handling rules are easy to learn. Once I got the hang of it, sliding around and pulling off efficient weight transfers was extremely satisfying! Of course, just like with any other media, if the audio and visual aesthetics don't vibe with you, you might be out of luck with this one. Fortunately for me, I enjoyed everything the developer, ViJuDa, put into the game!

Well, everything except for the camera. The top-down chase cameras worked well for the most part, but in a third of the stages I had an extremely hard time with visibility. Most stages feature an abundance of elevation changes that add variety and a healthy dose of challenge and fun. However, because the camera looks down at the car instead of the road ahead, often it's very hard to see an upcoming elevation change or a sharp corner until it's too late, especially at higher speeds. I was hoping the copilot would resolve this issue, but it didn't. In fact, the arrow notifications kept obscuring the road. I couldn't find an option to keep just the voice pace notes, so I had to disable the copilot entirely. To help with visibility, I would love to see a camera tilt or an FOV option in a future update!

The camera limitation definitely made me enjoy Super Woden Rally Edge less than expected, but I still had a good time and completed all modes. I'm now slowly working towards unlocking all the cars.

I played the game in Kubuntu 24.04 with Proton, and it ran well.

A great tribute to the 'golden era' of rallying, this game is simply wonderful in its presentation, soundtrack, unique aesthetic style (a touch on the blurry side maybe), campaign pacing and progression, and most of all, handling. Now an isometric 3D semi top-down racer like this doesn't let itself to realistic handling, but that's not the agenda here. The way the cars react to inputs is satisfying, weighty, logical and easy to pick up. It's not Art of Rally, but it's more 'rally' and sim than Circuit Superstars.

Career mode is a pleasure to get through, Normal difficulty is quite fair, and doesn't require a mad grind or insane luck/perseverance/skill/track knowledge and impeccable timing like Woden GP2 - skill issue maybe, I suck at that game, but this one was fair and nothing took more than 3 attempts. I've 100% the game at 16 hours, and enjoyed every minute of it. Almost no critiques, it's certainly worth the money and a great production for a small team. Bravo, I hope to see more of these! Highly recommend!

Pros:
-Handles well
-Fair difficulty
-Great sound and graphics, optimised (ran even on my Intel HD graphics laptop)
-Fairly priced
-Superb selection of cars from the early eras of rally
-Awesome menus and songs, reminiscent of early Gran Turismo games
-Ticks ALL the boxes for what an arcadey game like this should be, plus more

Cons:
-Career a bit short (is that a fair con? Games' too good!)
-Cone knocking challenge a bit misplaced? Maybe should be in a tutorial about handbrake or something. Gymkhanas are very fun though
-Some of the AI split times don't make sense, but the overall stage times always do (minor niggle)
-Shifting 'by ear' can be tricky, car always sounds like it's on limiter even if you're a gear too high, have to get used to it - most sim drivers will release throttle or shift up on instinct, not the case here

Great arcade-y rally racer. Fans of "Art of Rally" will find enjoyment here, and I'd argue that this game controls slightly better. Music is great and varied. My two complaints are the camera is a little restrictive on uphill sections, and that the co-driver callouts are sometimes inconsistent in their usefulness.