Despite the sacrifices, V-Rally 4 is still the most detailed racing game on Switch for the time being. It’s difficult but remains a lot of fun. With GRID also on the way, perhaps the racing sim genre is making a real return to Nintendo platforms.

With the WRC series on hold for 2018, V-Rally 4 took the rally-title for Kylotonn. Fortunately, a lot of the racing mechanics are streamlined compared to past experiences, easily allowing for newcomers to jump in and pick up the controls quickly, while veterans will still enjoy the difficulty boosts. Some stages wildly inconsistent with their degree of difficulty - and with only a career mode, and online play the features in this complete game are quite lacklustre. While hours of racing can be enjoyed, this will eventually wear quite thin pretty fast.

A very complete game in terms of game modes and gameplay. A good arcade game, although certain graphic problems and some issues in the frame rate will disappoint the fans.

V-Rally 4 is an old-school rally game at heart, for better and worse (but mainly the latter). If you stick with it you’ll eventually start to master and enjoy it, but the slippery handling and unforgiving ‘no mistakes allowed’ rally races make getting to that point a real slog. On top of this, its numerous performance issues are so severe that they aren’t just ugly, they’re downright distracting: the result being that although this is now the best rally game on Switch by default, pretty much every aspect of it leaves acres of room for improvement.

Unfortunately what the game does manage to get right is quickly dampened by some rather glaring and unforgivable flaws. It’s a real shame, the Switch has seen two racers make its way to the console in the last month and neither has stood out for positive reasons. Maybe 2019 will fare better.

V-Rally 4 aims to be a solid sim racer on Switch comparable to its PS4 and Xbox One counterparts, but the limited power of Nintendo’s hybrid console sees it spinning its wheels too often.

An already sub-par racing game is even worse on Switch. The whole experience suffers from technical limitations of the hardware.