Rush Rally 3 Review: A true console-quality racer on mobile?

Rush Rally 3 launched this week, bringing with it the promise of a console quality racer on mobile.

On paper, it certainly sounds it. For just shy of five bucks you get 72 different stages to race through with almost as many cars, a wide range of weather effects, a day and night cycle, controller support, and it all runs in a super smooth 60 frames per second.

But how does it play? Well, this is a rally racer, so don’t expect to be speeding down motorways causing traffic collisions in ridiculous neon-tinged vehicles.

Instead, you’ll spend most of your time trying to squeeze seconds off your best times on a variety of tight circuits – each of which can be completed in as little as three minutes.

Rush Rally 3 contains a wide variety of different game modes

You can take part in tournaments, single rallies, skill games, and multiplayer – whichever takes your fancy. No matter how you choose to play, you’ll earn cash that you can spend on new cars and upgrades, so you’re always progressing.

So it’s got all of the right features, but does it feel like a console game? Well, sure – as long as the console is the PS2. It’s not particularly a looker – especially when you compare it to the likes of Asphalt 9 or CSR Racing 2.

It does run very smoothly though, no matter the weather effects the game throws at you. Whether it’s raining at night or snowing during the day, you’ll have a great experience.

If not, you can always head on over to the graphics settings, which provides a ton of different options to fine-tune performance to your liking.

Though the visuals aren’t great, the physics and car handling are very realstic

Where the game does excel though, is in the general physics and handling. Cars feel very realistic, and respond exactly how you’d expect them to in real life.

So if you’re a real car or rally racing buff, you’ll feel right at home. We started to get a kick out of figuring out the right time to slow down before a turn, then hit the gas to get back up to optimal speed.

Also, your car behaves very differently depending on the terrain, so you have to keep that in mind. You can probably afford to go a little faster on a dry tarmac road than you can on an icy forest path.

Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed our time with Rush Rally 3. While we don’t think it quite lives up to its promise of a current gen console racer, it does offer a remarkable package at under five bucks.

If you’re a fan of rally racing, you won’t find much better than this on mobile.