There are times when a racing game comes along and reminds you that you don’t need a £500 steering wheel, three monitors, and the emotional resilience of a professional rally driver to have fun. Super Woden: Rally Edge is such a title. This Super Woden spin-off from ViJuDa takes the wonderfully old-school spirit of the series and points it down a rally stage, where the scenery is charming, the cars are gloriously retro, and the main opponent is generally a stopwatch.
Previous Super Woden instalments used an isometric viewpoint, while Rally Edge adopts a chase camera, giving proceedings a much greater sense of speed and immersion. Most importantly, since this is a rally title, and rally stages have an irritating habit of introducing corners that are meant to give you a hard time, the higher viewpoint provides that precious extra glimpse of what’s coming. And even if you don’t succeed, at least you’ll crash with useful information.
It’s important to note that the handling, while fine and all, is one of the many things that makes it clear that this isn’t attempting to be a sim-like experience…and frankly, thank goodness. It’s an approachable racing title with an arcade heart; one that also offers some of the enjoyment that comes with the more hardcore-oriented titles, like cars to buy and upgrade, a career mode, and so on. Press a button to start moving, here’s the brake button, and here’s the handbrake. Now try to improve your time by 0.13 seconds. Now try again. And again. Yup. One more time.
E and even D-class vehicles do tend to feel more like slow-moving bricks than rally cars, but the faster cars are tremendous fun, with controlled slides and rapid changes of direction providing plenty of those rare gaming moments where you instinctively pump your fist in the air before remembering that nobody else is in the room. Alternatively, you can try the two-to-four split-screen local multiplayer mode, and fill that gap in that thing you call a soul with a little company.
Sigh…
Aside from Arcade and Time Trial, the main career mode takes the player through five vehicle classes, from E to A, with increasingly quick machinery and increasingly complicated stages. You earn stars by finishing on the podium, collect cash to purchase and upgrade cars (both quite expensive), every now and then receive a new car as a prize, and gradually unlock tougher events. It’s a beautifully simple structure that provides a surprisingly powerful incentive to keep playing.
This, of course, is a low-budget indie project, and as such it won’t offer the thrills of the big names. Super realistic or stylish visuals? Nope. Tons of modes? No, not here. Known supercars? We’ve got supercars at home ‑ the imitation variety. That said, what it lacks in content it makes up for by simply being fun. You can blame the wonderful level design for that, probably the best thing here, as they are full of memorable moments.
Japan brings narrow and undulating roads, Spain offers twisty sequences of hairpins, Sweden introduces (what else?) snow. Each corner is a puzzle that needs solving, and doing so feels good – even when you lose first place by one freaking second! Crucially, new road layouts are introduced at a steady pace, so even late in the campaign there remains a sense of discovery rather than simply revisiting the same handful of corners in increasingly expensive machinery.
The Nintendo Switch version suits Super Woden’s character wonderfully. Rally Edge is a pick-up-and-play piece of software, making it particularly well suited to the system. The visual style is deliberately retro and easy on the eyes, so it won’t tire you when you hold the Switch in your hands. A neat Photo Mode is also available so that you can capture moments of coolness, or when you crash like a moron.
Pretty neat for a one-man creation, don’t you agree?
