I'm sure anyone reading this is aware that Re-Volt is particularly tough to get used to as a beginner, even compared to other racing games. Like, tear-your-hair-out tough. The biggest reason is that the cars are prone to seemingly random spinouts and flips -- which is realistic from a physics perspective and incredibly frustrating for a first-time player. Thing is, the game actually has a very nice difficulty curve, but only if you can get past that first huge hump.

So I'm writing this guide for people who come looking for advice on how to get over that hump. I realize that in the long run, success will really come down to individual style (for instance, many people will be better at handling the super-fast cars than I am). But these tips are intended to help people get comfortable with the game to the point that they can start developing those personal styles instead of trying to figure out how to throw a digital game out of an analog window.

1) Change the race mode from Arcade to Console to start out. You might not know it from the descriptions of the settings in-game, but this will help to eliminate a lot of those weird spinouts that seem to come from nowhere, and also make it a bit easier to keep your car upright. Speed remains the same in this setting, but the physics are more conventional, so it feels more like a normal racing game.

2) Turn off powerups. If the source of your frustration with the game is its utter unpredictability, then why let the AI zap you with lightning, shoot you with rockets, or turn you into a bomb? For getting used to the car handling, pare the gameplay down to just racing. Personally, I find it more fun this way anyway.

3) Choose cars with moderate speed/acceleration and high weight. This keeps you from slipping so much. You can also give up some weight in favor of some more acceleration, but the weight rating should be at least as high as the speed rating. For the bronze tracks, I recommend Colonel Moss. It has good enough stability to outmaneuver the faster cars but is fast enough to outpace the heavier ones.

Each time you beat all of the single races in a championship set (as opposed to playing the championship itself), you will unlock a car that is specifically designed for exceptional stability and decent speed relative to the opponents you'll be facing at that stage of the game. Beating all the bronze tracks gives you the Mouse, silver gives you Bertha Ballistics, gold gives you the Rotor, and platinum gives you the Panga. Personally, I loved Bertha Ballistics best of any car in the game, and I was able to beat almost the entire rest of the game with it. However, if you have a lot of trouble with flipping over, you can try Rotor, which is the only car in the game that can keep driving if it turns upside down. (Note: Rotor is generally considered to have pretty poor performance due to its low acceleration; you may find it helpful if you're flipping a lot, but you likely won't get a lot of use out of it). You'll probably want to switch to Panda for the final championship if you haven't developed another play style by then, as it's the fastest of the heavy cars. I personally didn't find Mouse to be better than Colonel Moss, but that will come down to preference.

4) Now that you've set yourself up with a version of Re-Volt that plays more like conventional racing games, success depends on the same kinds of maneuvers as it does in those other games. Decelerate going into turns, make good use of powersliding, and know when to tap the turn key vs. holding it down. Powersliding refers to taking your finger off the accelerator key and hitting the turn key hard in order to spin the car almost 180 degrees, which is important for sharp turns.

Some rules of thumb: If you're going through a 90-degree turn like the ones all over Toys in the Hood, hold the accelerator and tap the turn key. If you're facing a wide almost-180-degree turn like the blue room in the first museum level, hold the turn key and tap the accelerator. If you're facing a sharp 180, powerslide.

PhantomRVM has some great in-depth driving tips here as well, including more on tapping: http://www.gog.com/forum/revolt/time_trial_advice

5) Once you've got a handle on the game, you can add on levels of challenge individually. Turn powerups back on. Then set it back to Arcade. Then try faster, lighter cars. Or whatever.

I hope this helps people!

Sorry but this is a bad tip for newcomers, Rotor one of the worst cars in the game, next to Pest Control.
This is due to its big wheels (which will easily get the car caught in any obstacles or walls) and its heavy weight in combination with its relatively slow acceleration.

The first one may not be so much of a problem in easier difficulty modes (it gets pretty much unplayable in Simulation difficulty though) but since most tracks consist of lots of turns and jumps, the latter will slow you down no matter what.

Not to mention that in older versions (aka the original and the beta community patch which is used in the gog version), Rotor will be slower when he driving upside down which has been "fixed" in the later alpha community patches (according to the person who patched it, this behaviour was due to a bug in the physics code).

Panda is also not the best choice for competitive driving, again because of the exposed wheels and the big size of the car itself (though the latter makes it a good choice for collecting stars in Practice mode which will also unlock cars).

Personally I would recommend one of these cars
- for Semi-Pro: Adeon, Zipper
- for Pro: Toycea, Cougar

Fair enough. As I mentioned, it wasn't my first choice; I was just stating the benefits of it. I have edited the OP to take your suggestion into account and hopefully make things clearer :) This guide is not for competitive racing, though. It's for struggling beginners, who will find cars like Bertha and Panda much easier to deal with initially than something like Toyeca or Adeon.

Well competitive racing is at least required to win the races and the championships to unlock more cars ;)

Also I don't really see how cars like Toyeca or Adeon are more difficult to handle than other cars, especially Toyeca is/was considered to be very overused in online races due to its easy handling.

In fact I also don't really get why people consider this game "so hard" but I guess that comes with the fact that have known and (moreless) played the game for over 10 years and forgot how I experienced the game when I first played it (I don't consider myself to be a "pro" player though).

Haha, yeah, sounds like you're very experienced with this game. I actually started playing Re-Volt about a month ago. Had a really hard time adjusting to it (and that was coming right out of playing Powerslide, which isn't the easiest racing game either), and when I came onto the forums I couldn't find a lot of info on how to deal with the quirks that I thought made this game harder for me. So I figured it out as I played and then posted this guide so that someone like me could know what to do in the same situation. I went from just starting out to beating the Platinum championship in about a week, maybe 8 or 9 days tops, using the methods and settings I described above. So that's where I'm coming from. I don't expect that this advice will be good for people who do competitive multiplayer--I was just trying to get a handle on the mechanics while racing the AI.

best advice...

put down the gamepad and use the keyboard.

Wow NotJabba! If only I'd had some excellent guide like this 15 year ago things would have been a lot easier!
I like the way you describe the types of turns. And I have to agree, competitive style and beginner style are completely different things. Professional racing techniques require years of training. The tips in this guide are excellent for those people starting to control the cars at a beginner level. The important thing at first is knowing that you can, believe in yourself and practice with the rookie cars. I remember my first favourite being Harvester for its great handling. I won my first Bronze Cup with it. Great memories. :)

Oh, and thanks for quoting!

OK, I give up. Even with the tips from the OP I just cannot play this game, I keep sliding around like I'm drunk (and yes, I turned off vsync). It doesn't help either that the level designers though putting sharp 90° turns and a tunnel with no surface parallel to the ground in the first track and ice in the second track was a good idea.

This reminds me of Driftmania on the Wii, it's a nice game, but the AI is too good, it can drive almost perfectly while I keep bouncing and sliding all over the place. But at least Driftmania has local co-op for up to eight players.

In racing game, I think the hardest section is controlling the balance. It ts difficult but it is awesome, so thrilling!

Better advice: lobotomise the AI bots like Ross Scott did in the equally unfair snowspeeder racer Polaris Snocross PC (also badly in need of a GOG release, with no dumb AI, read: get rid of the original AI as it's far too smart) and hack the lives system to give you infinite lives.

The saddest part is that with the community made remaster, they did nothing to address the difficulty or steering in the game. If anything, they made it even harder thanks to the more aggressive A.I. with no option to tone it down!

The game isn't supposed to be that hard to steer. I remember there being a bug even on the console version that caused the steering to keep "slipping out from under you".

You have to play with the controller settings, like the sensitivity and whatnot. Or reset them with "Reset Detault" option.

But yeah, even on simulation settings, when you fully turn any of the cars, they're not supposed to slip that much.