I like racing games. I like them a lot. In fact, the first game that I ever played was a racing game.
However, I only like well-done racing games, and Race Cars: The Extreme Rally isn't one.
For starters, the camera view is always stuck high in the sky above the cars. As if that wasn't bad enough, only one camera mode(of three) actually follows your car - the others just hover over the track at a fixed angle, which gets disorienting as it forces you to drive towards the screen, reversing your directional controls. Then there's the completely unrealistic physics. Try to turn in Normal or Hard difficulty, and your car either careens out of the curve or oversteers. In Easy mode, it feels like there's an invisible rail guiding your car along the track. If you hit a tree, sign, or other obstacle, you have to drive backwards to get away This is a fairly easy and mundane task in other games, but in Race Cars: The Extreme Rally, the horrible steering is even harder to control, putting the car into a reverse doughnut. Did I mention that there are only three powerups, and that two have the same effect(there's also a power-down)?
The graphics, at least, are nice, if not "photo-realistic" as claimed by the developers. The lighting is much better than in MachineHell, and the textures are pleasing. The only problem is that the cars themselves look like shiny, textured lumps, as they simply do not have enough polygons to look convincinly like their real-world counterparts.
The music is annoying, consisting mostly of noisy, sample-heavy techno. It also drowned out the single exhaust note shared by all of the cars. At least you can replace the music with your own, in .ogg format.
As for the theme, well, it's a racing game. You get the usual varied scenery and real-world cars, except that the names of the cars have been changed(e.g. the BMW 6 series is called the Beemer, the Lamborghini Diablo is called Devil, etc.) to avoid licensing fees, and the scenery is simply recycled for each of the 20+ tournaments. Mediocre, to say the least.
Overall, I give Race Cars: The Extreme Rally a score of six and a quarter out of ten(six for gameplay, eight for graphics, six for sound, and five for theme). It's pretty mediocre, a fact exacerbated by the availability of many freeware and abandonware alternatives. If you're nostalgic for the bird's-eye view racing games of the DOS era, this is the perfect game for you. For everyone else, it's hardly worth the bother.
Small side note: It is never explained why it has the subtitle, "The Extreme Rally", as it is neither a sequel nor a prequel.