Exo Rally Championship is the first hard sci-fi racing game

The next checkpoint is only 500 metres away. Unfortunately, it’s along the rim of a deep crater and I’m running low on RCS fuel. The gravity here is weak, so my tyres are wearing slowly, but hitting a bump at any kind of speed will send me into the air. If that happens, I might not be able to control my orientation enough to land the right way up and avoid tumbling down the side of the crater. To make things worse, a meteor storm is starting, and while my on-board computer can model future impacts to give me a few seconds of warning, that weak gravity means I’ve got less grip on this dusty surface. All I can do is pick a line, build some momentum and hope it all works out.

If that paragraph speaks to you, Exo Rally Championship might be right up your street. It's a new science fiction rally game from Exbleative, the developer behind Exo One.

When I was young, I adored playing those early 3D racing games that gave you so much freedom to traverse the terrain. Big Red Racing in 1996 and Motocross Madness from 1998 pushed you towards checkpoints but didn’t really care how you got there. Figuring out the fastest route over uneven terrain and how fast you could hit an incline without losing control was captivating when 3D graphics were still a novelty, and occasionally ignoring the objectives and just seeing how fast you could yeet yourself over a mountain was peak entertainment in my twelve-year-old brain. 

Over two decades later, very few games have managed to scratch that same itch. Exo Rally Championship has picked up the torch and embraced not only the sense of freedom, but the spirit of going as fast as you can while barely staying in control. On top of this, there’s a layer of hard science fiction and a respect for real rally championships that creates a racing game unlike anything I’ve ever played before.