In 1998, my family got a PlayStation. We were allowed one game each. My siblings chose Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider. I chose Colin McRae Rally from Codemasters. I subsequently cheated and also picked Gran Turismo for my dad, but my point is that Colin McRae Rally is one of the most formative racers I’ve ever played. EA Sports WRC is the latest chapter in that long-running off-road odyssey. With the lasting legacy of the Colin McRae and Dirt Rally series at its core and a juicy injection of official WRC content – plus the strength of the cracking F1 games as a sister series – how could WRC go wrong? Easily, it turns out, as a range of performance problems and disappointing features have combined here to jam a banana in the tailpipe of WRC’s otherwise fantastic loose surface handling, impeccable audio, and killer car list.
WRC has seen Codemasters pivot from its traditional in-house engine to Unreal, a switch that was described as necessary in order for WRC to support the longest rally stages the studio has ever built. Those extra-long stages have arrived; at around 30 kilometres they’re around twice the length of even the longest routes in the previous Dirt games, and they are very welcome. I do enjoy longer stages like this (just like the Epic Stages in the previous official WRC games from Kylotonn) as they’re such satisfying tests of consistency and endurance, and they have a real feeling of occasion to them you just don’t get from quick, five-minute blasts.
However, this engine swap also appears to have introduced a range of nasty performance issues in WRC that I never came across in the previous Dirt series. The worst is the regular stuttering. I suspect I could probably ignore it if it was confined to just the
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DiRT
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Colin Macrae