When EA bought Codemasters and put the kibosh on the Dirt series, I was saddened. Not only am I awfully fond of the mainline series, but the Dirt Rally games were also excellent. But not all hope is lost, as the gameplay we know and love from that subfranchise has returned from the grave with WRC, which is basically a Dirt Rally game by another name. As far as rally games go, this delivers pretty much everything I expected alongside some killer features that make it a great choice for anyone looking to carefully navigate tough corners on winding tracks.
WRC has multiple choices of modes to pick from, but they all mostly centre around the core you’d expect. You jump in a car and race a track from start to finish as quickly as possible for the most part. But there are also regularity rallies that task you with getting to the end while incurring as few penalties as possible. You’ll be hit with penalties for going over or below the required speed limit, driving off the track, or what-have-you. The vast majority of the game’s events are the former, though, which is preferable. Regularity rallies are fun in their own right, but the real star is the regular rallies.
The main focus is on the career mode, which has you create a racer and take them through seasons week-by-week. Championship mode lets you take part in sets of predetermined races as famous drivers or your created one, plus there’s a mode with new challenges added every week that all have certain goals. Then there’s quickplay, which allows you to either choose from predetermined races or to customize exactly what you want. There’s a fair bit of content, especially considering that WRC sells for below AAA retail price.
In career mode, you’ll pick a benefactor that’ll fund your racing, but there’s a decent amount of involvement here. Benefactors have targets you’re expected to hit, such as taking part in specific events, but doing well and refraining from going over budget will cause their overall happiness level to rise. When you start out, you’ll have hard caps on what you can do. You have a specific budget for the cars you can buy, the staff you can hire, and how many repairs you can do in the midst of events. All of this is increased by meeting requirements in events you pick from the weekly calendar.
“There’s a fair bit of content, especially considering that WRC sells for below AAA retail price.”
Because of this, you’ll find yourself having to choose between what to do each week. You can only do a single thing weekly, so if one event offers an increase to your car budget and there’s also a benefactor event that week, you’ll need to pick whichever best suits your needs. You can also use the week to hire new staff, train your lead engineer (by buying perks that grant various benefits), and letting your staff rest, as they have stamina that gets depleted. Any damage your car takes during an event is persistent, so you’ll need to repair your components, lest you find yourself in hot water when they fail.
You need to keep within your repair budget, but also factor in the time it takes to do those repairs, as going over has consequences. If you take too much damage during an event, your car will be totalled, and you’ll have to pull out of the race. Or you can just force quit the game and restart to find yourself back where you started on the event menu. WRC has 17 locations, all with multiple different routes, which makes for a fairly large amount of content. You will have to sell and add new cars early on, though, as events require different vehicle types and you won’t have the cash to hold onto everything.
On the default difficulty, WRC is honestly very lenient, but if you find yourself making major mistakes, getting into first place won’t be doable. You simply drive from the start to the finish while your co-driver calls out directions alongside visual markers that make it clear what you’re supposed to do to make it through the next turn. Some routes are fairly perilous, and you can find yourself flipping over or falling off the track completely. This isn’t a huge issue for shorter routes, but longer ones can easily take 15 minutes or so on occasion.
“…if you’re hungry for a new high-quality rally game, WRC is a great choice.”
You can reset yourself to the track if need be, but that incurs a time penalty that can easily cost you a victory. Thankfully, the cars mostly handle very well. WRC is a Codemasters game, so there’s a lot of arcadeyness to the car handling. Don’t expect anything sim-like here. That being said, the game can still be plenty challenging if you’re not careful. You have to pay a lot of attention on the more demanding routes and having to restart a race from the beginning because of a single error can be disheartening. There are also some cars here and there that control like garbage, so those can be an absolute pain to deal with.
Performance-wise, WRC is pretty demanding at ultra settings. With a 3090 and 5700x, I often had certain tracks dip into the 40s. Turning some things down kept me consistently in the 80s and above, however, so there’s plenty of room to tune the settings to meet your needs while keeping the performance up. The game looks quite nice, with many well-realized locations that have some lovely vistas. The install is quite large, though, weighing in at about 80 GB, which is still a far cry from the considerably worse-looking Forza Motorsport and its 120 GB.
Overall, if you’re hungry for a new high-quality rally game, WRC is a great choice. It’s got plenty of content, a satisfying simcade driving model, lots of great routes to drive, and some engaging choices to make in terms of progression. It’s always a treat to dig into a new Codemasters game and the dev absolutely doesn’t disappoint here.
