World Rally Fever: Born on the Road Review!

Introduction 

World Rally Fever: Born on the Road is an arcade racing game for the MS-DOS platform, with its main draw being its anime aesthetic, vibrant art style, and smooth graphics. Taking place across 16 different tracks, eight drivers compete to come out on top! 

Let’s race, shall we? 

World Rally Fever is comprised of four cups, each with four tracks full of obstacles and hazards based on different cities like Scotland or Kyoto. Although the first Rookie Cup track in Scotland is a smooth sail, the game quickly shows its deck of cards by throwing walls that must be jumped over, obstacles that slow you down, and even bottomless pits. To spice things up further, there are basic power-ups that can increase your speed or completely crash opponents into a full stop. You must make it to at least third place in every track (failure results in a loss, and you must use one credit from a limited amount of them to restart that race) and must be first in the cup standings to win that cup. 

One of the first things you notice about World Rally Fever is how differently it controls from other racing games, which takes some time to get used to. For instance, you tap or hold left until you turn your car the way you want it to and then release the left key throughout your drift – then when you’re done turning, you steer back to the right to straighten. On top of that, switching lanes takes a lot more effort than your typical racing game, which means making a snap decision to take a less accessible side of a fork is discouraged. 

It’s also worth noting that the drivers also have different stats, although the game doesn’t show them. I have listed them in this table based on an Italian manual for the game: 

This sounds like a challenge! 

World Rally Fever has the foundation of a fun game, and I enjoyed a lot of what it had to offer. The music is simply amazing and exciting (GOG even includes the soundtrack as a separately downloadable extra), and the 3D visuals are only second best to Doom. Half the time, it was just exhilarating to learn and play. 

But the other half is where the issues come into play. Born on the Road leans more heavily on the cheaper aspects of arcade sensibilities. For example, the tracks are not just reliant on muscle memory (like the Hawaii tracks), but they also use timed obstacles that close or open sections of the track (like the swinging crates in Italy, or the sliding doors in Kyoto), and these obstacles will happily get out of the way of the AI opponents – but not for you. It’s harder still to dodge some of these with the stiff lane switching as well. 

The opponents have extremely obvious rubber banding during lap 1, where it is impossible to overtake them, and as they hit walls or get struck by power-ups, they quickly catch up to their “intended” positions. Plus, they’re very aggressive and will block you from overtaking them, resulting in many crashes. 

With the lack of a single race mode, it’s also hard to practice and learn anything past the first track of a cup. In these cases, the game feels just as hard as a bullet hell game, but without the practice mode to lower the barrier of entry. I even found myself watching a YouTube video in the end to figure out how to get past the tracks in the Pro cup, the hardest cup. 

Conclusion 

Despite all its cheap tactics that put you at a disadvantage compared to the AI drivers and evil design decisions of the tracks, when it’s fun, World Rally Fever is really fun. If you’re willing to put up with its arcade sensibilities and ready to go in despite all of that, I think it’s a game that’s worth a play-through. 

I just wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t like trial-and-error games or get frustrated easily, and thankfully, there are plenty of other racing games with retro sensibilities but without arcade shenanigans, like Slipstream.

For other racing romps, check out our reviews of Star Wars Episode I Racer, Outrun 2019 and Final Freeway 2R! Or what about the action driving games Highway Pursuit and Byte Driver?