V-Rally 4

On paper V-Rally 4 sounds like it should deliver everything you’d want for a rally racer. It has a lengthy single player, plenty of tracks and environments and a decent sized list of cars to tinker with in the garage. Unfortunately what the game does manage to get right is quickly dampened by some rather glaring and unforgivable flaws. It’s a real shame, the Switch has seen two racers make its way to the console in the last month and neither has stood out for positive reasons. Maybe 2019 will fare better.

V-Rally 4 is an old-school rally game at heart, for better and worse (but mainly the latter). If you stick with it you’ll eventually start to master and enjoy it, but the slippery handling and unforgiving ‘no mistakes allowed’ rally races make getting to that point a real slog. On top of this, its numerous performance issues are so severe that they aren’t just ugly, they’re downright distracting: the result being that although this is now the best rally game on Switch by default, pretty much every aspect of it leaves acres of room for improvement.

It all amounts to an underwhelming experience that you'll struggle to encourage yourself to play. Yes, there's lots of modes to try, and yes, there's all sorts of courses to race on, but you'll ask yourself why you're bothering at basically every turn. It at least works, and there is some sense of accomplishment when you finally get your car under control for a few seconds before it flies off the track again. But if you're looking for truly spectacular racing action on Switch, you aren't gonna find it here.