It turns out that almost every other loose surface racing sim for two decades has been going easy on you. Dirt Rally 2, EA WRC and the Nacon games feel completely different to each other, but what they all have in common is a certain amount of good grace. They massage your inputs. They give you that extra hundredth of a second to catch the drift. You don't realise how important that leeway is, until you play a game that doesn't give it to you. Welcome to Assetto Corsa Rally.
While Kunos Simulazioni is still busy building its Gran Turismo-style omni-simulator Assetto Corsa Evo, the Roman Studio has embarked on a technical partnership with compatriots Supernova Games Studios to bring the most authentic—and demanding—rally sim to PC since the venerable Richard Burns Rally. Kunos handed over the vehicle handling physics and other technical data, then Supernova gave a stoic nod, loaded up Unreal Engine 5, and promptly set to work building a game that will ruthlessly dissolve any ego you had about being handy in the gravel.
Although it's the work of a separate studio, it's funny how distinctly 'Assetto Corsa' this project looks and feels. There's a distinctive crispness and clarity to the visuals which seems to be engine-agnostic, creating a uniform look between running on AC Evo's proprietary engine and AC Rally's UE5. Most importantly, the latter inherits that same authoritative handling feeling. You don't question the level of realism when you're on track in AC Evo, and nor do you spend even a microsecond doubting the car's behaviour during a rally stage.
Don't cut
While that's fundamentally down to some incomprehensibly complex physics, there's also the fact that rallying as a discipline leaves you with very few idle brain cells for thinking about anything else at all. The route is being positively thrown in your face in this game, calling for endless micro-decisions and judgments.
Does that kink look flat out up ahead? Should you risk keeping it nailed over the blind crest? Did that last pace note say left three, or two? Not to diminish the inherent skill in track racing, but at least when you're jostling for positions at Spa-Francorchamps in a GT car you know what the next three corners look like and there isn't a passenger shouting in your ear.
Which brings us to the heart of the proposition: the intrinsic satisfaction of mastering motorsport's toughest discipline. Even when you're making mistakes in this game—and you will, absolutely loads of them, for hours— you're gleaning some gratification. Because for a few corners at a time, you're dancing the vehicle to and fro, right on the edge of traction, playing with its fine balance. Doing that, in such an unforgiving sim, digesting pace notes all the while, simply makes you feel like a rally driver.
Scanners
The earliest of Assetto Corsa Rally's early access incarnations feature four rally stages across two locations. One is the snaking tarmac of Alsace in northeastern France, where hay bale chicanes punctuate long, devilish straights that egg you on to keep the throttle flat out for another hundred metres. The other is Hafren, a wonderland of loose surface corners in the Welsh hills where felled logs plot your downfall, edging onto the outer limits of the road surface.
Both look spectacular in UE5. And it's appropriate, having uttered the name of that unholy game engine, to point out that the build I played was running at a rock-solid frame rate on an RTX 5070 rig, somewhere below maximum settings. I didn't notice any stutters or hangs of the type that diminished AC Evo's Early Access launch, and have outright ruined other non-racing UE5 releases in 2025.
As for the fidelity level, I can only comment on the unspecified graphics settings I sampled which sit somewhere below the maximum. But I can say that both the vehicle and the environment look fantastic. It's a leap forward visually from any other rally sim, including EA WRC, which also used Unreal Engine to great effect in broadening the landscape surrounding the road, but also suffered performance problems.
What stands out about both locations—and demonstrates Supernova's devotion to accuracy—is that like all stages that will feature, they're fully laser-scanned. That's a first for rally games, and it's not just a flex for the Steam page. There are gameplay benefits.
For the first time in the genre the roads are as wide—or as narrow—as they are in reality."
Once upon a time, developers built tracks from photographic references. More recently, the process of gathering a precise inch-by-inch-profile of the location by laser-scanning has become table stakes for circuit-based racing sims, to the degree that even EA's simcade F1 25 is in the process of updating its roster to laser-scanned versions. It provides much more detail about the precise topography of the track, the tiny imperfections in the track surface, and the profile of trackside furniture like suburbs and runoff areas. Thus far though, its application has been limited to circuits.
Generally, rally games use real locations, but either plot approximate routes or recreate specific sections from the real stages. Nobody has previously been mad enough to go out and laser-scan every inch of a 10-20km road network. Until now, because Supernova has done just that.
What that means for us, the brave fools about to try driving a rally car down them, is that for the first time in the genre the roads are as wide—or as narrow—as they are in reality. It's not just the bumps and divots or the exact gradients of the hills. It's the claustrophobic tightening of a singletrack down a corridor of trees, the perilous profile of the ditches either side, and the menacing protrusions of mulched earth that lie in wait just beyond the driveable surface, ready to launch your wheel up into an involuntary gymnastics routine.
Surface tension
It's not a huge amount of road in total at launch, but the inclusion of two very different road surfaces means that there's enough material to work with if you really want to master the car's behaviour in different conditions. The two surface types offer, as you'd expect, vastly different levels of grip and drift, but Supernova's weather system adds even more variety.
I raced a stage at Hafren in stormy conditions, the track already as soaked as it could be, grip levels at absolute minimum. The feeling was striking. Not one moment of that stage did my rear wheels truly have full traction. It was a constant slip-and-slide, such a punishing set of conditions that no other rally sim has dared to send the player up against.
Richard Burns Rally's ears are probably burning after that last sentence. It's true that AC Rally evokes the legendary 21-year-old title, although in material terms they have very little in common. RBR has been kept alive by a sizable team of amateur modders, and exists now as more of a platform than as a game in its own right. Obviously it doesn't look like AC Rally, nor are its stages as detailed, nor the weather. The reason it springs to mind is that it was the last time a studio dared to present rally in such a punishing, unfiltered form.
The fact that people are still playing and modding it two decades later says something about this game's potential, too. Most publishers would get frightened by the idea of releasing a game that's so inaccessible, and that might frustrate the player so much during their first drive that they simply disengage. But having held players to that same exacting standard for three track racing games now with AC, ACC and AC Evo? Kunos and 505 know better.
They know that players respond well to a stern challenge, one that's intrinsic to the driving. And that's just as well, because although AC Rally will be barebones as it enters Early Access, without a career mode or a full rally, there's still plenty of mileage to be had in it. We will, of course, want to feel career progression in solo play in the fullness of time, just as we'll want an online competitive ecosystem to prove ourselves in. But before we get to that stage, we'll need to master one of the finest and most formidable rally physics models ever constructed.
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