[Review] WRC 8

[R e i]

WRC 8 Game information
GENRE: Racing, Simulation, Sports
DEVELOPER: KT Racing
PUBLISHER: Nacon
FRANCHISE: WRC, Nacon
RELEASE DATE: 8 Sep, 2020

 

 

Though it’s been through some hard times over the past 19 years, KT Racing’s WRC series has been steadily improving since the French development team’s tenure with the license began in 2015, and WRC 8 represents its biggest leap in quality to date. Packed with outstanding stage design and bolstered by a number of welcome improvements – including a much richer and more nuanced career mode – WRC 8 is certainly the most in-depth rally sim to ever wear the official license. Finally, it’s positioned to compete with the big names in the genre.Whether played with a pad or a wheel, WRC 8 is a satisfying arm wrestle and certainly the best-feeling WRC game I’ve played – and that extends back to Evolution’s memorable stint with the license back in the PS2 era. On a pad, the FWD cars like aggressive taps of the stick for countersteering – anxious drags just induce fishtailing. They also need keen tugs of the trigger to brake hard and step the rear out. The AWD WRC cars and their otherworldly acceleration and grip require much more finesse; you can pivot them on the throttle but they demand smoother inputs all around. On a wheel, however, it really starts to sing; it’s slippy but responsive as the tyres relentlessly claw at any surface, and the force feedback is impressive and effective.
Watch the KT Racing team discuss WRC 8's improved physics in the video belowWRC 8 is the latest rally title from Bigben Interactive, and unlike Codemasters' simulation series, it's officially licensed -- all the cars, teams, and tracks from the real world sport are present and correct. It's a neat advantage, but having an FIA sticker on the box doesn't guarantee a good time on the track.Fortunately, the game delivers a decent racing experience, with plenty of ways to enjoy the official routes of this year's season. The Career mode, which you can begin in either Junior WRC or WRC 2, will take you through the calendar of events, but when you aren't racing, there's a couple of areas to sink your teeth into. You'll need to manage your schedule, your team, and the relationship with your car manufacturer to stand the best chance on the track. You'll also use XP towards a skill tree as you progress. If you aren't bothered about the management side of things, Seasons mode allows you to simply play rallies without any distractions. Single events, online matchmaking, and weekly events will keep you busy, too, and there's a training area where you can better get to grips with WRC 8's handling.

 

 

Specific staff now need to be hired to fill six important roles, each of whom come with gameplay benefits attached to make those decisions feel meaningful. Skilled mechanics can accomplish more repairs within the limited window at the service park between stages; effective agents can wrangle invites to more exclusive one-off events; and canny meteorologists can forecast further into the future, giving you an idea about potential weather changes deeper into stages.Granted, it’s a little daft how quickly staff tend to tire considering they’re not the ones doing to the actual driving. For instance, while my co-driver and I spent several days slicing through Swedish tundra at speeds that would make even the sternest scrotum shrivel, my agent got so burnt out from sipping champagne and eating tiny triangle sandwiches in the hospitality tent that he needed a week off. It’s also more than a little incongruous that it’d be up to the driver to personally manage staff vacation time in the first place. That said, I think the crew management is still a good addition to WRC 8, injecting a welcome team atmosphere into what had previously been a pretty lonely experience.There’s also now a large skill and tech tree, shamelessly reminiscent of the R&D system that’s been part of the F1 games for several years now, and it adds a bunch of extra layers to WRC 8’s racing career. Whether you choose to apply upgrade points to improving your cash and XP awards or you opt to target strictly technical improvements is up to you. There’s a little bit of arbitrary game-y nonsense when it comes to managing bonus objectives (it’s illogical your reputation with your current manufacturer would take a hit simply for using a particular tyre compound during a rally if you’d also just won the rally) but overall it’s still a huge improvement from the entirely vanilla career experience of WRC 7.Watch the KT Racing team discuss WRC 8's stage design in the video below.A handsome looking racer, WRC 8’s lighting effects are particularly strong this year. Low sun pierces through the treelines and a spectrum of time-of-day conditions are on offer to really change up the aesthetics of stages run under different cloud and weather scenarios. Attention to detail has improved, too. Beading water, which was surprisingly sub-par in WRC 7, has been replaced with a much more modern and authentic rain effect in WRC 8. The suitably streaky effect that accompanies flicking the wipers on for the first time is nice, too (with dynamic weather, those of us who race in cabin view need to manually toggle the wipers any time it begins to rain, or if the windscreen has simply accumulated too much muck to see out of). The water-splash effects have had a boost as well, and they’re accompanied by a deafening blast as puddles pummel the undercarriage.

 

 

WRC 8 arrived with a radically overhauled career mode that seemed to draw inspiration from both the Dirt and F1 games, turning WRC 7’s vanilla shuffle from one event to the next into something that made me feel as if I really had an actual race team around me. WRC 9 seems mostly the same in this department, but to avoid déjà vu it probably could’ve done with a way for returning players of WRC 8 to skip past the feeder series and get straight to the WRC championship proper.It’s also still pretty incongruous that it’d be up to a newly-hired driver to personally rotate staff out for vacation time, although it’s less annoying this time because team-members don’t seem to tire as quickly in WRC 9. The ridiculous bonus objectives have remained, though, and while the penalty for ignoring them or brushing them away is only slight, it’s still hard to swallow your current manufacturer reputation dropping after you win a rally, all because you had the audacity to… choose the best tyre compound for the job instead of an arbitrarily mandated one. Were you saving those tyres for a special occasion, lads? I thought I was doing the right thing using them to… drive faster than those other blokes.There have been a few refurbishments elsewhere, with a handful of subtle but welcome tweaks since WRC 8. The feeling of weight seems better, though cars are no less nimble; there just seems to be an improved sensation of bulk as your car dances across the gravel, which is ideal. There’s a new English co-driver whose delivery is more organic, though it’d be nice to have one who has the dialogue on-hand to be able to react in real-time to your good (or bad) driving. Additionally, the awkwardly stiff chase cam finally appears to have been nixed in favour of one that lets the car slide and pivot more on its centre axis while the camera remains facing forwards. Previous chase cams have seemed like GoPros attached to the back of your car on a broomstick and I found them virtually impossible to use.There seem to have been improvements made to the already excellent sound mix, too. Everything from the racket of kick-up from loose surfaces to worn brakes seems stronger in WRC 9, although I have encountered an odd bug on multiple occasions where the engine sound becomes soft and muted despite all other effects remaining at normal levelsLess ideal is the AI, the skill level of which is now determined by a slider instead of named difficulty levels. The slider suggests more control to dial it in right at the perfect level to match your own driving skill, but the disparity in the AI’s performance across rallies can often be strange, especially when they go from nipping at your heels at one event to lagging miles behind in the next, despite no changes to their setting.

 

MINIMUM: 
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows® 7 64bits
Processor: Intel Core i3-2100 or AMD FX-4350
Memory: 6 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 2GB or ATI Radeon HD 5870 2GB
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 19 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible Soundcard
Additional Notes: 64bit Only
RECOMMENDED:
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Processor: Intel Core i5-6600 or AMD Ryzen 5 1600
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 3GB or Radeon RX 580 4GB
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 19 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible Soundcard
Additional Notes: 64bit Only