A solo experience where you use both hands rather than one
The main game mode is Road to the WRC, a typically structured career path where you earn your right to become World Champion by starting off at the bottom in the regional championships and earning credits along the way for completing races. With your hard-earned cash, you can purchase new cars, customize your vehicle and in the process attract new sponsors. Though it lacks in presentation, the career mode accurately represents the path you would take if you hoped to win the World Rally Championship and its non-linear set-up means that you can tackle races in no set order. The team editing feature is fairly basic, so there's room to expand here with future iterations, but you can add your own personal touch by using a palette of colours and can customize cars with liveries and logos to give your team a unique look.Rallying is a difficult sport to make into an exciting video game, largely because it involves racing alone rather than against opposition. Codemasters achieved this through flashy production and arcade-style handling, and in DiRT 2 decided to ditch the solo racing in multiplayer and allow for competitive races. Milestone has opted for a much more basic, no thrills no spills approach, that lacks all the bells and whistles of DiRT. In some ways this is WRC's strength as well as weakness, representing a major shift in thinking from the over-the-top approach of Codemasters.
WRC is a tough game to master. You can't go full pelt and screech around bends like an inexperienced joy rider. Instead, you need to take a measured approach, learn how to hand brake at the right time and apply pressure to your brakes as you approach the corners, otherwise you'll lost your back-end. The handling is initially tough to master, especially if you're coming to WRC from an arcade-style racing game, but it is extremely rewarding when you get it right. Though it doesn't quite capture the same speed and intensity of DiRT 2, it feels less contrived and more realistic. This is something that real fans of the sport may well embrace.
There are some brilliantly designed courses to race across and you can really feel the difference in handling as you move across the likes of wet gravel, or hard tarmac. The weather conditions also affect the way you drive and part of the challenge and fun to be had is having to adapt the way you drive accordingly. It's also good to see a damage modeling system that impressively shows every bump and scrape that you pick up on the track. Overall, it marks an impressive debut for Milestone and WRC, but it's still a game that has a long way to go if it hopes to deliver an all-round entertaining experience and one that keeps you coming back for more.
Continued Overleaf...
