Wrc 9 Fia World Rally Championship Review
Idara Viengxay
The career mode remains the focal point of the entire game. The depth found within is impressive as players can tweak their cars to their liking, while also hiring staff, planning races, and spending copious amounts of time customizing their experience. For someone like me who prefers arcade-style rally games this mode is always overwhelming when I review one of these games. Thankfully there are a ton of helpful menus and pointers to explain what it all means. Still players can easily spend as much time tweaking and sorting through menus as they do racing. So keep that in mind.
Outside of career mode there is plenty to keep players busy. There is of course single races where all the options are available and plenty of cars to choose from. There are also training courses, tutorials to master the craft, and even a season mode outside of the career. The multiplayer options are also robust, featuring online modes as well as split screen and even a co-driver local mode that is a lot more fun than I thought it would be. Needless to say there is plenty to keep fans busy within this package.
I am not an expert on car handling. That being said, WRC 10 feels extremely realistic to the point that it will likely turn off some players. This is the kind of game that if you want to take corners at full speed, it is not the game for you. The precision and braking that has to be performed will keep players on their toes around every bend. This is an experience for people who enjoy realism and the developers have done an outstanding job making each car feel unique, and each course requiring practice. Knowing when to brake, when to drift, and what angles to take turns is paramount. This is a game of patience and precision and it can be exhilarating when executed perfectly.
WRC 10 is one fine looking game. The car models are outstanding and the damage modeling only adds to the experience. The tracks are gorgeous with plenty of dust and weather effects that look simply stunning at times. The frame rate holds up on the new consoles creating a smooth racing experience. There is little to complain about when it comes to simply looking at this game. It truly showcases some visual eye candy. Audio is equally impressive with the engine hums and crunching metal sounding fantastic through either my headphones or sound setup. The co-driver is as drab as ever, lending to the authenticity of the experience.
For the uninitiated, what we have here is a game that replicates the real-life FIA World Rally Championship. Traditionally held across 13 events around the world, this is point-to-point racing against the clock, with a co-driver delivering a rough idea of what sort of corner is coming up next.
The main focal point is the Career mode, working your way up from Junior WRC, through WRC 3, WRC 2 and finally into the main WRC to fight for the overall world championship. You can manage your team in terms of vehicle and personnel upgrades, contract offers, objectives and of course, winning rallies. Between all of this are fun events featuring historic cars or extreme conditions to break things up.
Your rivals are more erratic than a Kris Meeke rally performance. You can have a good run and finish 20 seconds off the pace on one stage, only to beat everyone by half a minute driving like a rookie on the next. Some serious balancing is required across the events.
Usually, at this point in a WRC review, I would go on to talk about some slightly shabby graphics, unruly vehicle handling and moan about the sound, before summing up as an enjoyable game that lacks a certain sparkle.
The main breakthrough is the way the cars handle. The vehicles have significant weight to them. The WRC 2 cars have pliant suspension that soaks up bumps, rolls a little through corners and provides satisfying body control. Previously, the main WRC class cars would be very skittish, a slight abrasion throwing them around too much. Now, thanks to a leap forward in suspension control, they ride over lumps and even corner edges with ease. Just like they should.
Using a gamepad still results in the odd over-correction, being a bit too easy to end up weaving down the road in the quickest car, but you can adapt to that. Give it time and you will be rewarded. Handbraking around a hairpin is more satisfying than licking the lid of a yoghurt.
New locations for this season include Japan, New Zealand and Kenya. The African stages are a little bland, perhaps the most derivative in the whole game, but New Zealand offers some of the best roads in a rally game, flowing from one camber to the next. Understandably, last-minute post-Covid-19 events such as Estonia and Ypres are missing.
An enhanced suite of online features and the promise of additional Finnish and Portuguese stages, not to mention next-gen upgrades coming for PS5 and Xbox Series X, will mean it has a longer shelf life than previous instalments. I certainly plan on playing it for the foreseeable future.
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Do you know what the most exciting thing about the World Rally Championship is right now? It's not that Mini has returned to the sport since leaving after the Summer of Love. By far the most remarkable thing about world-level rallying at the time of writing is the fact that, with two events to go, there's no certainty Sebastian Loeb will drive his way to this year's championship.
I appreciate that, if you're not a WRC follower, the above statement is likely to have hit you with the force of a sickly seahorse. So know this: Loeb has been an unstoppable winning machine since the dawn of time. (Or, at the very least, the past seven years.)
Whether he manages to squeeze a magnificent eighth title into his trophy room is actually irrelevant, though. The lesson that we should all learn from this previously unthinkable scenario is that things, inevitably, move on.
But judging by WRC2, Milestone's been skipping school. 12 months on from the developer's first stab at steering the official WRC licence and there's disappointingly little evidence of evolution. In fact, if you read last year's WRC review (God bless you), I ought to point out that I've neither lost my mind, nor am I trying to fob the editor off with a sneaky cut-and-paste-and-tweak job here. The two articles risk ending up suspiciously similar because the games are, in most areas, identical.
Despite a quick graphical makeover, the initial menu layout and options (The Road to the WRC, WRC Rally School, Single Player, Hot Seat for two, three or four players and online) are a mirror image of 2010's game. Trying to spot significant differences in all but the career mode becomes as tricky as getting a straight answer out of James Murdoch.
Yes, Rally School does offer an extra slab of six (often stupidly short) lessons compared to last year's equivalent, and the (solid, ghost-based) 16-player online options now include a Quick Match element entirely dedicated to the new Super Special Stage inclusions. You'll also spot a 'rewind' option borrowed from GRID, along with a 'Look to apex' Shift 2-inspired counterpart (the effect of which proves hard to notice in play).
And, of course, the official licence also dictates that you get this season's car categories: WRC, SWRC, PWRC, FIA WRC Academy, WRC Group B and WRC Safari (think classics like the Escort RS 1600, Evo III and, er, Peugeot 504) - though in practice this has little impact.
In just about every other respect, though, things are just as they were in 2010 and at no time is this more disappointing than when behind the wheel. Last year's game had a knack of separating you from the on-track action by providing little-to-no feedback when it came to what the car's tyres were up to, and WRC 2 fares little better in this regard.
You can go entire stages - certainly when on tarmac - with your joypad's vibration motors (which you'll have to activate in the options, incidentally) seemingly on strike. But even then, there just isn't enough subtlety and range within the handling to tie you to the road surface and convey the illusion of driving in a manner that ever becomes intuitive. Like WRC, however, you can learn to anticipate car behaviour through trial and error.
There is also a useful Rally School included. It is handy to get to know how the game handles, be it with the controller or a wheel. You get to practice all the basic rally manoeuvres in FWD and AWD machinery on gravel, tarmac and snow, covering the major surfaces.
If you play on Expert, you best bring your A-game. It is expectedly tough, and you have to drive each stage somewhat close to perfect to be towards the front of the field. This is good preparation if you want to try one of the many online challenges. These allow you to compete against other players around the world on single stage events that are available for a limited time, usually a few days.
A nice touch, however, is that you can win real world prizes for being in the top five. There is also the interesting proposition of a full e-Sports challenge running concurrently with the actual 2016 FIA World Rally Championship. This means that WRC 5 should offer heaps of replayability going forward.
WRC 8 is the perfect entry for both longtime players and for those who maybe have skipped the past one or so. The series has never been better with this latest entry receiving major improvements both in the career mode and in the visuals. More can be done to improve the car selection and a rewind function would be nice to make this a bit more approachable. Everything else in the game is great though and makes this a must for any rally racing fan.
*WRC 8: FIA World Rally Championship is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC and is coming soon to Nintendo Switch. Reviewed on a PS4 Pro. Review copy provided by the publisher for this review.
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