Welcome to our review of WRC 8, a racing game that looks to redefine the genre and does its very best to succeed!
The WRC championship is the most challenging motor racing competition in the world.
With the new dynamic weather system, climatic conditions have true-to-life effects: rain and snowfall is now an important game feature as variable traction, different set-ups for each stage, tire choice, and shrewd use of the weather forecasting team all need to be considered.
The single-player Career mode has been rebuilt from the ground up: calendar management, R&D to improve performance, staff recruitment and management (mechanics, engineers, medical and weather teams, finance manager, etc.).
For multiplayer, weekly challenges and WRC eSports return, but the challenge and competition is now even stiffer.
With 50 teams, 14 rallies and over 100 special stages in the 2019 season, WRC 8 has the deepest content ever included in an off-road racing game.
I admit I skipped the most recent iterations of this game series and I was kind of flabbergasted by the sheer amount of options that WRC 8 provides. I am not a fan of the racing game genre but I actually really enjoyed this game more than I’d normally admit.
When you get to play this amazing piece of racing experience, you are hit by a great steering experience and I would call it near-legendary almost, legendary as in the fact that it made me enjoy the genre so much that I ended up missing sleep on a working day to keep playing.
From the engineer/garage side to actually racing, everything is really well prepared and pleasantly provided. I was even enjoying reading the in-game emails when I got mail. I thought the mechanics were a very nice addition to the franchise (full disclosure, last time I played the franchise, I only played the racing side).
Then on to the racing, I will admit to being bad at this genre because usually, I had nothing to relate to. I am a very careful driver in real life, I adore my hybrid Toyota Yaris in my everyday life and I did clearly notice the Yaris on the cover of the game, it actually made me relate to this game for the first time in very long and while it is really a silly reason, it did do the trick to get me interested and I am glad it did.
Once I got to actually racing, I felt a little awkward as my real-life driving style is quite the opposite. Sure, I like to push the pedal from now and then, but I am mostly a gentle driver. But here, I was able to just floor it, instantly respawn upon crashing and I was able to grasp the gist of how to drive powerfully from the first hour of game time.
What I really loved, the power in steering. I was able to really adapt to the power of the car within minutes and after getting the hand of drifting through turns and chicanes, I was almost considering myself to be a great driver. Mind you that I really am not anything special, I really do suck, but WRC just made me feel like I was really able to enjoy the genre.
Graphically, there is so much to be said about this game as well. Having the option to just display or really endure damage realistically, there is the full spectrum of options present. Once again, I was impressed by how advanced this game series had become.
Now, this brings up the question on how to rate this game considering I have not really played any of the previous games to compare it to. So I decided to rate it purely on the enjoyment it gave me. This brings my score down to a 9 out of 10 and I would like to explain why I am giving it a seemingly high score for a game in a genre I do not even play often.
I just clicked with the game.
It all comes down to that simple statement, I just clicked with WRC 8 and enjoyed it. I loved the racing, everything around it and as I mentioned before, I even lost sleep over this game. This is usually only happening for the RPG genre or the best of puzzle games (like Boxboy and Picross), it had never before happened because of a racing game.
It was just that much fun and it felt natural to be driving the beastly powered cars.
In conclusion, more fun than I expected it to be and I am so sure fans of the genre will love this one!
