These problems are perhaps forgivable, but what is not is the fact that the original Colin McRae Rally 2.o had a cockpit camera with properly modelled interiors and this mobile port does not. These options must be changed in a pre-game launcher and cannot be altered in-game. Meanwhile the graphical options are limited to resolution, fullscreen on or off and a whopping two graphical presets: high or low. The menus are clearly designed to be used with a touchscreen and are slow and awkward on PC. Indeed, laziness can be found in other areas. Other problems exist, like shadows that are simply wrong and missing textures. There are white lines between them static backdrops and the track, for example. Textures are horrendous throughout, and there’s countless examples of areas where the textures don’t even join up properly. Trees, fences and people are all actually simple forward facing sprites that revolve on the spot to face you, and on certain tracks you can spy murky blobs down the track that sprout textures before your very eyes as you drive toward them, revealing themselves to be static backdrops of trees and even entire mountains. While the car models do look okay, track detail is incredibly poor. Worse, it barely manages to look better than the PC version of CMR 2.0 which was released in 2000.

Yes, it is better looking than CMR 2.0 for the Playstation 1, there’s no denying that, but that doesn’t stop this from being a graphically bland game across the board. How the hell did that happen? With everything we can do now, even on mobile platforms, this should surely have been even better than its namesake, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t it!? Somewhat amazingly given the vast leaps in technology we’ve made over the years this is a far worse game than both Colin McRae Rally and Colin McRae Rally 2.0. What this ultimately means for us is that Colin McRae Rally HD is missing vast amounts of content in comparison to the original CMR 2.0.

The second thing to know is that this isn’t a HD remastering of the truly brilliant CMR 2.0, but rather a mobile port 2013’s Colin McRae Rally which is described as having “upgraded and tuned content based on the acclaimed 2001 PlayStation title Colin McRae Rally 2.0.”ĭuring the writing of this review Codemaster’s actually changed the game’s Steam description after a torrent of negative reviews from customers who felt cheated, pointing out that while it was never said directly everything on the Steam page was worded to make potential customers think it was a HD remake of the original CMR 2.0, rather than a port of a mobile game that was only loosely based upon the Colin McRae series. It also uses certain assets from across the entire series. Firstly, despite the name Colin McRae Rally HD ( as it shall now be referred to) is actually based more on Colin McRae Rally 2.0, and not the first game which was released back in 1998 for PS1 and PC. There’s two important things to tackle before we really dig into this game, though. Those two games helped me through some rough times in regards to my Cystic Fibrosis, so naturally when a game seemingly claiming to be a HD remake of Colin McRae Rally unexpectedly arrived on Steam I contacted Codemasters straight away and asked for a review code. I’ve got a long and emotional history with the Colin McRae Rally series, especially with the first two games, both of which have many happy memories of me and my older brother attached to them.

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