Gravel Review from Square Enix and Milestone

Milestone S.r.l. has been busy lately. They recently released Monster Energy Supercross The Official Videogame and now they are back with Gravel, an arcade-style racing game. Let’s take a look at what they brought to the table.

The career mode in Gravel centers around a fictional Gravel TV show. You race in various events including Cross Country, Wild Rush, Stadium and Speed Cross each with their own spin. The default AI level seemed a little on the easier side to me. I’m not the greatest racer, but even on the Medium difficulty, I was able to quickly move up in the race and even won a few times.  The AI can be adjusted a couple level stronger for those more advanced racers.

Gravel is designed to be more arcade than sim, so even with improved AI, there is still a good sense of fun in the game without worrying too much about damage to your vehicle. Multiplayer options are there but the player options seem barren and often times either I gave up waiting for others to join or I couldn’t find a server with many racers.  Hopefully the longer the game is out, the more populated the player base will become, in turn, making it easier to find players.

The graphics in Gravel are good but don’t reach the levels of beauty found in Forza Horizon 3. Tracks are laid out nicely with unique environments and objects flying past you as you traverse the course. I’ve always preferred playing racing games with the cockpit view, but I found it restricting and ended up using an outside camera view in the race.

The game audio is the biggest shortcoming in my opinion. The sounds of the races were good, hearing the difference in sound going across types of terrain gives it a solid sense of realism, but nothing really was outstanding. However, the bigger audio issue I had was in the campaign mode. I like the Gravel TV show presentation idea but found that after a few races, it became very repetitive and I started skipping the race cutscenes so I didn’t have to hear the audio from the announcer.

Gravel Review Final Thoughts:

Gravel didn’t make my top 5 games list, but it’s not a terrible racing game. Personally, I didn’t find any issues with the game, I just wasn’t overwhelmed by any specific aspect of the game. If you decide to give Gravel a try, it’s available for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and on Steam for $49.99.