Gravel
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Gravel is the ultimate off-road experience, an extreme racing game that will let you pull out amazing stunts in the wildest places on the planet! Pure fun, spectacular scenery and no-holds barred competition in many offline and online game modes.
Steam User 17
kinda works on steam deck if anyone was curious.
Steam User 11
Amazing game with UEVR injector streaming through Virtual Desktop on my Shadow PC Power tier (a cloud computer). Honestly having more fun with this than Gran Turismo 7 on PSVR2 (which is a great experience too for sure).
Steam User 9
I recently played The Crew 2, Dirt 5 and Forza 4 & 5, and I have to say that while Gravel is not a AAA title like those, I'm enjoy the game physics here a lot more.
It is still missing "something" to be on par with those titles, but overall I'm really enjoying the races; and for the price, is a great purchase.
Steam User 6
I was a little disappointed with Gravel. It's not a bad game by any means, and it has no glaring issues, it's just... unremarkable.
It starts pretty well for an arcade racer, with an engaging Solo mode introduced like the season of a show with real actors, each with their own specialty. But as you keep playing, unlocking new events and cars, the hype kind of fizzles out and you end up going into the next event with fewer and fewer expectations. It's a shame, as the game is quite varied. With lap races on real tracks, lap races in more open and wild environments, stadium races and checkpoint races, most people will find something they like. It's just that by doing a little bit of everything, none of it is fantastic and easily outdone by games that focus on that one thing you enjoy the most.
I personnaly liked the checkpoint races in Namibia the best, because they felt unique and new. Sadly there really isn't a lot of them, and you will feel the same way about your favorite type of races, which is unfortunate.
The game looks okay. It's not beautiful but it looks pretty good for something that came out in 2018 and the different environments are colorful. There's enough here to keep you entertained for 10 to 12 hours, and the AI offers a decent challenge with minimal rubberbanding.
A few things could however spoil your enjoyment of an otherwise decent game, starting with short but frequent lag spikes. Every now and then, the game will freeze for a full second for no apparent reason. That doesn't last long and it won't make you lose the race, but that's enough time to roll your eyes and feel annoyed.
The physics, even for an arcade racer, are pretty funky and sometimes unpredictable. I also thought most of the night races were a chore as you really can't see well enough, while that's obviously not a problem for the AI.
Finally and if you stuck with the game this far, you might want to try the multiplayer with a friend or two. Doing this, you would find yourself quite puzzled by how convoluted the interface is. You will usually end up on the starting line thinking "Oh, that's not the race I expected" and "Hum, so this is the car category I picked ? But I thought...". I doubt much testing went into this, and the result is once again, an unfulfilling experience.
Thinking about it, I don't know whom I would recommend Gravel to. Old arcade racers are better, recent Sim racers are way more advanced... Gravel is just one more "okay" racing game that doesn't fully commit to any genre. If you've played everything else, sure, the game is fine. But that's the problem, it's "just" fine. A disappointed 6.
Steam User 8
With UEVR this game is really good!
Steam User 10
Glad to see the review score for Gravel's changed over time from the Negative it was at for so long. Milestone's not known for great games but this one might just be their best. Provided you're not after a proper rally simulator Gravel has several hours of fun in the base game on a nice variety of real and fictitious tracks with a plethora of licensed vehicles. Times of day impact the ease of which some tracks can be completed, with rain entirely changing the surface alongside looking amazing at night.
Achievement hunters note this can be completed without any of the DLC...although I will admit some of the overpowered vehicles it includes can help you place better. Also there is one DLC with tank racing (fine, overpowered Ferret APC to be technical) so uhhh yeah get that. Time to beat is anywhere from 18 to 25 hours depending on skill.
Gravel is such an easy recommend, especially when on sale for as cheap as it goes nowadays.
Steam User 7
As the title of this game would imply, Gravel is kind of like a cheaper version of Dirt, but I really enjoyed it for what it was, a kind of simcade offroad racer, leaning more toward the arcade side. It feels like the sort of AA arcade racer that you used to pick up for $20 on PS2 at Walmart back in 2004, in a good way. And unlike most of the Dirt series, it is still listed on Steam and available to purchase!
I chose the term offroad racer intentionally because this is NOT a rally game. There is no co-driver, no pace notes, and most of the racing you will do will have other vehicles on the track. The game has a lot of rally cars in it, but like Sega Rally, you are mostly racing wheel to wheel against other cars. There are time trial events though, and a kind of novel event type where signs pop up in front of you throughout the course with either a red X or a green arrow, and you have to hit the green arrow otherwise you get slowed down. Kind of a unique challenge, but nothing mind blowing, and sometimes it seems like it doesn't give you enough time to react to hit the correct sign, but these events don't ruin the game or anything.
The premise of the career is that you are an up and coming offroad race driver appearing on a show on the Gravel TV channel. An announcer gives a voice over at the start and end of races, and throughout the game you have to face off against 5 different boss racers. These characters have names and actors and custom liveries for their cars, but otherwise have no real personality, for better or worse. The career is divvied up into different "episodes" of the fictional TV show, which each include a series of races, which give you 1-3 stars for completing them, with more stars awarded for better finishing position. Earn enough stars and you can do a series of races against one of the boss racers. Beat the boss and you unlock their special car livery for the vehicles they used, and you can move on in the campaign. Pretty straightforward.
The vehicle and track selection here I thought was actually one of the most impressive aspects. There's about 50 vehicles in the game, and there are both free and paid DLC vehicles on top of that. It's got a lot of the rally cars you'd expect in a rally adjacent game: a Ford Focus, a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X, a few Subaru Imprezas, Ford Escorts, Lancia Deltas. It is missing some manufacturers like Audi, Peugot, Citroen, and Skoda. But it does have a good handful of racing trucks, and some more oddball vehicles, like the Toyota 222D, Porsche 924, Vauxhall Astra, and Volkswagen Beetle. And then the DLC vehicle packs contain some military vehicles and small buggies.
Track selection includes wider high speed courses in temperate, tropical, snow, and desert biomes, as well as some sort of mixed surface rallycross type courses, and tighter stadium courses. A good variety of track types and settings to have all in a single game.
Physics encourage sliding, which is pretty easy but still reasonably satisfying to control. It's accessible to drive without just having you press a button to switch into drift mode. The game also has a points system for stylish driving, awarding points for high speed, drifting, and catching air, and you can string combos together by doing multiple maneuvers in succession. Beating events gives you points, which increases your driver level. Stylish driving also gives you additional points on top, but most of your leveling will come from just beating events. For example you might get 100,000 points for finishing in first, and your other driving maneuvers might get you another 20,000 on top of that. Increasing your driver level will unlock more vehicles and liveries. This game actually has at least 3 or 4 different liveries for most cars, which I had fun unlocking and looking at. A refreshing change from the modern trend of throwing in an in-depth livery editor that requires artistic creativity and an hour of your time applying decals to make something decent looking.
Finishing the campaign probably takes somewhere around 15 hours, and getting 3 stars on every event and maxing out your driver level to unlock all vehicles and liveries, including DLC, might take closer to 20. There are a couple of achievements tied to the online multiplayer. This game wasn't very popular when it came out, and there's probably no one playing it now, so getting those could be tough, but they are pretty simple, one achievement for playing an online race, and another for playing 10 online races, so still doable if you have a friend who wants to play with you online for an hour or two. I got pretty much every other achievement over the course of standard single player gameplay.
I'll add the graphics look kind of washed out to me, like there's a gray filter over the screen. Not sure it's the best way to describe it, and I think it's just a setting on my end that I need to change, but I don't know what the setting is. Even the Steam notifications I get while playing appear in more of a faded gray color than the normal solid dark blue or black. Again, probably just a me problem, and I played through the whole game this way, didn't bother me too much, just a weird quirk.
Quick overview of DLC: There's a Porsche car pack, a buggy pack that adds some Polaris's and stuff like that, and the military vehicle pack which is a pretty cool novelty I haven't seen in other games, including a humvee, a WWII era Jeep or something, and a few other vehicles. Not much for original gameplay, but you won't see such vehicles in other modern games. There are also a few DLC track packs, one in a snowy environment, one taking place on and around a dam, and another just kind of regular offroad course in a desert environment.
The game goes on sale for $3, and all DLC can be bought for another $3. Gravel doesn't do anything groundbreaking, but it's an arcade offroad racer in a time where we don't have a ton of those anymore, there's no overbearing cheesy story, you won't get handed the fastest cars in the game after 30 minutes of gameplay, and you also don't need to grind for premium currency to buy what you want in game. It's a really solid early 2000's type arcade racing experience that is worth its meager sale price and respects your time.