The World Rally Championship is one of the ultimate tests of driving skill. Trying to get the fastest time on the most treacherous roads and off-road tracks in the world. Bring the same experience in your home but without getting dirty.
Rally yourself
WRC 9 is purely focused on traditional rallying events. The game offers both a good singleplayer experience as online. The core singleplayer mode is the career mode. In career mode, choose from either Junior WRC or WRC 3 (if you are up for a greater challenge). Junior is suggested for your first career, which makes you race in the same car as your competitors, a front-wheel-drive ford fiesta R2.
In a rally, you will race in Special stages, super special stages aka closed tracks and long stages called epic stages. The last race in a rally is the power stage and grants a bonus 5 points to the five fastest drivers of the stage. The participant who has the lowest total time across all the event will win the rally.
The game also has extreme conditions special events returning from WRC 8. These are rally events with either severe weather conditions or with a damaged vehicle, or both which really highlight the dynamic weather effects in WRC 9.
WRC is not only focused around driving but it’s also a game where you manage your team. You hire crew members with different skills but will also cost different amounts of money. Depending on your performance more people want to work for you. When you level-up you gain R&D Points. These points can be spent on different skills in a skill tree divided in 4 sections, that will help you along the way.
Besides the single-player there also is multiplayer. Multi-player has a thing like weekly/monthly events, multiplayer lobbies, and leaderboards. The game also includes a local split-screen mode which is always a big plus.
Realism to the max. Well almost…
Because WRC 9 is a sim heavy rally game the game can seem way too hard to control at first, but the more you play, the more you’ll get used to the driving mechanics and start to enjoy it. The difficulty/assist is changed by completing a track at the start of the game which will then offer up suggestions on the difficulty and assists you should start with based on how well you did. There is no option for things like a racing line to see when to brake or steering/braking assists like have become common in sim racers. The assists are real-life sport-specific things like turning ABS and traction on/off.
When you screw-up in an event there is sadly only the option to restart that event, for a total of 4 times. There is no rewind feature so make sure you don’t make a mistake. There is however a car reset feature that puts your car on the track again, but this will cost you precious time.
The combination of not being able to rewind time, having realistic assists, and driving with licensed cars and sponsorships on the real rally tracks, drives home the sim racing even more.
The graphics are great but far from perfect. When driving it is not noticeable that much but then you stop and look at things then you start to notice some lower resolution textures in the distance. I experienced some trees and fences pop-in and out here and there as well. The interface reminds me of Grand Turismo interface with the arrow pointing at your options. As a fully licensed game, official branding and teams are present, alongside 14 rallies.
Conclusion
WRC 9 is yet another tidy entry in the series. The game only improved slightly from its predecessors and has hard competition in the dirt racing series. But WRC is still a good and well-rounded experience if you are a fan of sim heavy racing/rally games.
