Colin McRae Rally [Android] [APK+Data]

Now this was a heck of a surprise when I jumped on to the forums the other day and saw that Colin McRae Rally [$2.99] was available on iOS. I rubbed my eyes and stared at the screen, thinking that the information was too good to be true and that someone must have spiked my cereal but no, it was right there, App Store link and all.

I quickly hurried off to the TouchArcade Command Center to see if anyone had laid claim to this title, thus securing the right to review and again, to my surprise, it had not been assigned. Being a huge Colin McRae series fan, I jumped on it and got to downloading, whilst gibbering away in tongues, all misty-eyed at the familiar screen grabs. Once the digital dirt-racing goodness had been downloaded to my iPad, I eagerly swatted the icon to open up what was, to be honest, a rather half-hearted reboot.

Colin McRae Rally isn't simply a port of the original PlayStation title. The game takes its design cues form the later 2.0 version but has been severely limited for iOS. There are only three environments (each split into two rallies, so six, if we're nitpicking), Australia, Greece and Corsica and four cars to play with, compared to the ancient, yet still brilliant offering for PlayStation. And to top it off, the ability to set up your car's handling characteristics for the various environments has been left on the cutting room floor.

In summary, Colin McRae Rally is a good game but with the series' heritage, it should have been a fantastic game. Perhaps the reason there wasn't a major fanfare about the iOS release was it was just cash-cow milking experiment. Despite the cut-down size and lackluster frame-rate, Colin McRae Rally will provide a few hours of shifting and drifting fun times and at this stage fills a rather wide void in the App Store's rally game department. It's just a shame we didn't get a more, for lack of a better word, completerally racing experience. Oh well, at least there is no IAP.