Exo Rally Championship's demo is out now, offering a 10-stage race across alien terrain

Colin McRae's Interstellar

Announced last year, Exo Rally Championship does what the name suggests: takes the rugged, weather-battered terrain of Exo One's interplanetary journey and replaces the ponderous plot and gravitational rise-and-fall spaceship movement with a six-wheel, space buggy rally competition. Or put another way, if Exo One was Christopher Nolan's Tiny Wings, then this is Colin McRae's Interstellar.

Now there's a demo, and it's substantial with a tutorial, a 10 stage rally, and three "ever-changing Daily Stages with online Steam leaderboards."

This is no rally game reskin, but takes full advantage of the setting. The landscapes you're speeding across are vast and unforgiving, crater-marked, littered with boulders, and battered by rain, lightning and meteors. It's only possible to make your way across them because your six-wheel-drive rover can catch considerable airtime on the low-gravity planets.

Land too hard and you'll lose a wheel or other valuable part of your machine, however. That's where air jets come in, which let you shunt your buggy around in mid-air to correct your orientation or soften your touchdown. The tutorials take you through using them in different scenarios, and it's a lot to consider. Enough that it's simultaneously intimidating but exciting to see what dedicated players can wring from these physics.

It's a stark contrast to what I wrote about in my Exo One review, a game which I felt lacked friction after you'd got to grips with its comparatively simple controls. Exo Rally Championship seems to have friction in spades, and promises a rich simulation with the ability to tune your rover, the need to repair it, and with tire and fuel types to match to different planetary destinations in the full game.

That full game is still "coming soon", but you can grab the demo now from Steam.