Next Gen Hors D'oeuvre 2: K-Rally
What is it?
A top-down racing game with weapons, a cross between a shoot-em-up and a Micro Machines-style driving game. You have to win races round various tracks, with free racing, tournament and career modes. To help you win races, you can buy and collect rockets and landmines which temporarily (or not-so-temporarily) stop rival cars. In tournaments and careers, you earn money which lets you buy upgrades to your car, or even buy a new car. There's also a ghost racing mode.
The gameplay is 2D but the graphics are 3D, with wonderful scenery and unlockable skins for all the tracks. The skins do more than just change the graphics, they can affect gameplay with weather conditions such as rain and snow. There's loads of graphical detail such as rocks, skidmarks, seagulls flying overhead, clouds etc. You can also set the detail level to suit your phone's hardware, as more recent phones have faster processors which can display intricate graphics more smoothly.
Why should I get it?
Because it's one of the best smartphone games ever made, and a fun game which plays well, has depth and looks great.
The developers of K-Rally are a company called Infinite Dreams, who are also developers on the Next Gen N-Gage platform. Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep is by the same team as K-Rally, and is shaping up to be one of the best games at the Next Gen launch.
You can read All About Symbian's detailed review of K-Rally here.
You can see a video of K-Rally in action over at the Unofficial Nokia Gaming Blog.
Getting hold of K-Rally
K-Rally is a commercial smartphone game which comes in many different versions. The version suitable for Next Gen N-Gage compatible phones is Symbian S60 3rd Edition, which you can buy at the link below:
Get K-Rally here!
To install K-Rally, buy and download the K-Rally SIS file from the link above, then use the PC Suite's application installer program with the phone connected to your computer by USB cable or Bluetooth. If you don't have PC Suite installed on your PC, it's a really good idea to get it. You can download the latest version from the Nokia PC Suite page.