EA Sports WRC

Let's be completely honest here, right from the start. WRC Generations was a bad rally game. It felt like the cars were floating 12 centimetres above the ground, the shifting of the centre of gravity was miserably badly emulated, the sense of speed was substandard, the scaling of the environments horrible (there are mailboxes in that game that are bigger than the car you're driving when you pass them) and the sound disastrous. When it was announced that Kylotonn Games would no longer develop the official WRC games, which would instead be produced by the team behind Dirt Rally and Dirt Rally 2.0, I applauded so hard that my palms burned for days. No racing game-related news could have pleased me more. Now that Codemasters' first official WRC game is here, I have of course scrutinised every micromillimetre.

Unlike WRC Generations, Dirt Rally 2.0 is a fantastic rally game. However, it was far from flawless. The cars slid around on top of the surface a little too much, the grip was unrealistically poor on dry surfaces with new tyres and the number of unique stages was far too low. The graphics were and remain incredibly gorgeous but the amount of bloom and excessive colouring made it look more arcadey than it was, and is, at times. With EA Sports WRC, Codemasters, led by producer Ross Gowing, has tried to fix all that.

EA Sports WRC contains as many cars as Dirt Rally 2.0 and the physics engine is the same, everything else is new. Codemasters has swapped out the old proprietary Ego Engine in favour of Unreal Engine 4 (4.8) and while the previous game from this team featured 19 miles of unique rally road, this contains over 65 miles of unique road. 17 countries, 204 stages and 82 cars are on offer along with a career mode, a car builder mode where you get to craft your dream car and online game modes that allow for daily challenges and upcoming tournaments, where the world's top virtual rally driver will of course be crowned. To say that this game is rich, or full of content, would be an understatement.

One of the things that Codemasters talked to us at Gamereactor about back in February was that they managed to transfer the car physics from Dirt Rally 2.0 to Unreal Engine and EA Sports WRC without loss. With more detailed force feedback and better tyre physics, it was easier for me to steer the car with the brake and by moving the centre of gravity at the right times, be able to put the car exactly where it should be. A part of me felt some scepticism that the amount of grip might have been exaggerated somewhat here, but after a couple of weeks with the finished game and the opportunity to jump between Dirt Rally 2.0 and this in our Racing Rig, I'm convinced that the actual car physics and the feeling behind the wheel - is better here, through and through.

The driving feel here is the single best in an official WRC game, by a wide margin. The weight of the cars, the way the suspension is felt in the steering wheel and the way the tyres grip the surface is very well done and although the difficulty level is high and although EA Sports WRC is difficult, it's not ruthless in a way that makes the driving feel merely choppy and the cars uncontrollable, which I often experience with the rally classic Richard Burns Rally, among others. The sense of speed is not quite as hysterical as in Dirt Rally 2.0 but it is very good and feels very realistic. This is partly due to the fact that the roads themselves have become narrower, here. Some countries' roads are so narrow that it feels like there are trees just outside the rear view mirrors and driving a 90s car through Japan requires a lot of patience and a lot of practice.

The force feedback system for all of us who drive with a steering wheel (only), together with the sharpened car physics, has become tighter, more detailed and it feels like there is a centre point now, a centre, where the weight and movement of the car is simulated and communicated, which is not the case with Dirt Rally 2.0. In that game, the force feedback is clearly approved, but it is also clear that nothing happens in the steering wheel until the driver tilts the wheels and reaches the tyre slip angle. As long as all four wheels are pointing straight ahead, the steering wheel feels dead - and that's not the case with EA Sports WRC.

The biggest and most significant reason why Codemasters for this game (and for the first time) abandoned their own Ego Engine and switched to Epic Games' super-popular Unreal Engine was that their own game engine didn't allow for special stages longer than 13 kilometres while EA Sports WRC houses stages twice as long. This, together with the fact that Epic's Unreal editor has made the creation of stages both easier and faster, and makes the change here make sense, to say the least. With the change from the Ego Engine, the graphics have of course changed and part of me misses the bloom from Dirt Rally 2.0 and thinks that the Unreal Engine's slightly raw, contrasty and anti-aliasing problematic look and style may not always work perfectly for rallying, but there is no doubt that this is a great looking game. The beta version I played just over a month ago suffered from some low-resolution textures, optimisation issues and god rays with the ability to bleed the image a little too much, but fortunately Codemasters' talented graphics team has fixed most of that. There are still some ground textures in some countries that aren't quite up to scratch and I think the sunlight in Mexico, for example, is so strong that it looks like you've turned up the brightness and contrast on the TV to 100%, but EA Sports WRC looks great. Don't think otherwise. It's also very well optimised. Better optimised than the almost five-year-old Dirt Rally 2.0.

The sound is good too, albeit slightly uneven. Codemasters' sound team has reduced the amount of reverb and instead tried to capture the real, raw sound of each car model and it shows. The sound differs more between different cars than it did in Dirt Rally and Dirt Rally 2.0 and some cars sound absolutely heavenly, here. Incredibly good. While others sound a little too thin, a little too weak and I miss the gravel mats against the undercarriage. In a future patch, I hope that Codemasters put in much, much more gravel mats.

The single best part of EA Sports WRC is the stages, which not only look more like the countries they take place in, are more varied and eventful, they contain more turns per kilometre (on average), are more technical and thus more demanding. Many of them are modelled in 1:1 scale on the actual real-life WRC stages and it shows. Driving special stages in, say, Chile or Kenya that take 22 minutes to complete is a sweaty experience to say the least and obviously requires inhuman amounts of concentration, and it's a good thing the pace notes are better here than in Dirt Rally 2.0, too. Jon Armstrong has written all of the pace notes which are read by Jonathan Jackson who is absolutely brilliant.

A career mode was something that Dirt Rally 2.0 lacked at launch but it was added via an update some 18 months later via "Colin McRae Flat Out" which allowed us to play as Colin for a couple of hours and race through his storied career as a rally legend. In EA Sports WRC, Codemasters has created a career mode that is more reminiscent of that in WRC 10 from Kylotonn Games and I believe that many will undoubtedly enjoy it. I'm not much of a career mode connoisseur when it comes to sim-racing and I haven't been particularly amused by what's on offer here either. Not because it's bad, by any means, but because I'm never really caught up in the different types of challenges and progression on offer. It becomes a bit impersonal and a bit old-fashioned, I think - this is also the case here. The builder mode where we in EA Sports WRC get the chance to build our very own rally car is a fun and rewarding way to give a greater and deeper insight into what it takes to put together a competitive WRC car, but it is a shame that the car building is not tied to the regulations in, for example, WRC or WRC 2, but is more "fantasy car".

The biggest and perhaps only real negative that I have found in this game is the damage to the cars, which is worse and less realistic than in Dirt Rally 2.0, which is disappointing. I'm fairly sure it's to do with WRC licences and whiny car manufacturers but that doesn't make me any less disappointed. Getting a flat tyre in this game is far, far too difficult and crashing the car is also too difficult. Driving into a Finnish fir tree trunk at 170 km/h with the "Realistic damage" setting activated would of course mean that the car turns into sprinkles and as it looks at launch, this is not the case. Instead, it's not uncommon for the car to be barely damaged at all by such a crash and Codemasters will have to fix that after the game is released. It needs to happen.

With EA Sports WRC, Codemasters has outshone all WRC games developed by Kylotonn, which is of course impressive. The driving itself is brilliant, the stages wonderful, the amount of content unbelievable and the audio-visual presentation really impressive. The menu system is nothing to shout about and the damage to the cars needs to be fixed, but other than that, this is a fantastic rally game that I will spend a thousand hours with. I can already guarantee that.