Recent reviews by Dänisches Bettenlager

I'm recommending the game because, after all, it's still mostly enjoyable top-down racing BUT please do not misunderstand: if you played and enjoyed the original, like me, this remake is not ANYWHERE near as good.

Let me summarize:

The visuals are effective - not great, but good enough. It's obvious that this game was first released on iOS and you can clearly see that the developers did NOT bother to increase the detail on the models (textures might have been improved, hard to tell, but the polygon count is very visibly low). Cars like the Deliverator definitely don't look as cool as they used to in the original, but that's subjective I guess.

Music and sound effects are bare minimum. Music was never a strong point of Death Rally so I'm not too bothered by the rather generic, boring and colorless rock tracks they put into this new version. The sound effects are okay, nothing to criticize too much here.

The biggest issue, to me, is the way they changed the in-game economy (ie. the shops - everything you did between races). In the original DOS game, you had the (legal) shop and the (illegal) black market. You had money and you would make important decisions what upgrade or car to save money for. This was a big part of playing the game and the separation between the clean shop and the dirty blackmarket (where you'd get all the good, ie. illegal, stuff) also added a very nice and grimy aspect to the game. Well, they removed ALL of this in the 2012 release. Now you don't even really have money anymore. Sure, you collect dollars but then, all they do, is fill up 'upgrade bars'. It was amazing to be able to safe cash to finally get to buy that amazing and mysterious Deliverator in the original - now cars don't even cost money anymore! You just unlock them by collecting parts on the race track! Now you just click on the armor, handling or speed bar and it fills it up automatically with your money. That's it.

The fact that they completely omitted the black market is also indicative of another change they made: the atmosphere, the vibe of the game, is now very typically iOS orientated. This new game is almost family-friendly while the old one was dark and, well, just plain cool. The writing used to be excellent, in my opinion, really putting you into that oil-stained illegal street-racing, loan-sharking, drug-collecting world. The new version you're buying here is bland and clean, almost sterile. The writing is bad (literally: there's a lot of typos and language errors in the game) and colorless. Even the interface is generic in its 'brushed metal' look.

Another annoyance is the length of the races. Once again, there's the iOS influence. The race length is between 30 and 50 secs average. It's often times NOT enough to kill opponents and it's definitely never enough to actually get 'into' a race. This is clearly designed to be played on mobile Apple devices on breaks, in the bus or on the train.

There's definitely more issues that set this 2012 version behind the original DOS release but those are the main points of frustration to me. However, as I said above, after all's been said and done, this is STILL enjoyable. The actual gameplay is, despite some flaws, still the same good old top-down driving, shooting and killing fun. I bought this on sale for less than two Euros and, for that price, it's a no-brainer must-buy, no question, I would however regret my purchase had I payed full price for it.