Well, here we are with a review of a dedicated single disciplined sport. I am used to getting a bit of a rally fix by loading Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport. The bonus with these is that you get a bit of rallying but you can also play open wheel, stock car and many more types of circuit racing.

 

With WRC 5, what we have here is a rally game plain and simple. Nothing added to the formula, Now, I'm not saying this is a problem, as with Forza the more disciplines of racing that you add to the game the more watered down the differences will become. So making a true dedicated single discipline really does make so much sense but the only problem is when these multi style games are around the same price sometimes it feels a little too expensive to buy a game that just does one thing?

 

I will say it’s been a good few years since I've really enjoyed a good rally game. I can think of 3 good rallying games and one even from this series: WRC 2. Now it might have lacked in the visual department but the handling was superb. Another was Dirt 2 from Codemasters and finally we come to one of my all-time favourite games ever and that was Sega Rally on the Saturn and Arcade.

 

So, as I said, WRC 2 was a superb rally game and I had super high hopes about WRC 3 as I had assumed that the game would have kept the physics from the 2nd game and build massively on the graphics. The graphics were leaps and bounds above WRC 2 but unfortunately the handling and physics were some of the worst I had seen for a very long time.

 

Now, with WRC 5 we have a game that adds a little to the graphics and really does seem to have a solid physics engine to get a nice handling system. So as you would expect if a game is called WRC 5 FIA World Rally Championship then this does indeed have all the official licences, cars, drivers and teams are all correct. The developer has also included all the official places the WRC will visit in the year although the stages themselves are made up by the French developer Kylotonn games.

 

There are a few game modes: a deep career mode, quick rally or quick stage. The latter two offer one stage or single rally; these are the best ways to practice. You can set the time of day and weather conditions during these. There's also a really school mode and anyone that’s played Gran Turismo will find no surprises as they start simple asking you to accelerate then stop at a certain point on the road within a time and not going over the stopping point. These challenges do get much more complicated as you advance through the school.

 

So the meat of the game is career mode here you do a quick test and depending on how you do then a team will offer you a place on their team. Choose wisely however as all the teams will ask you to drive a certain way. So this gives you something more depth to the career, and not only the shiny paint job of the cars. But you start in the J-WRC then you move to the WRC-2.

 

You also have a team morale to worry about as the better your performance then the faster and more repairs you can get done during the stages of each race. Now, here I will mention that the game is really hard and I had the game on hard but should of maybe lowered the difficulty down somewhat. When you lower the difficulty down you get more restarts and snapshots. Now a snapshot is what WRC 5 calls its flashback system.

 

Here I might have a little niggle with the actual handling here, now it’s much improved from the last couple in this series but I still find that the second game is still the sweet spot for me. On this game the handling ring feels a little light. The cars just feel hollow with no weight to them. Now this next problem I had was that the stages themselves and the fact that some are a good 10 minutes long and on the expert levels you might skid off the track at the start of the race and get damage and it’s just not fun to be driving at half speed with no reverse gear for 6-8 minutes. I guess I'm coming from this with the angle that Sega Rally had the stages down perfectly and yes I do understand that an arcade game and a simulation are completely different, but surely maybe a compromise might have fixed this for me?

 

Overall the graphics are much improved the car models and textures are really nice to look at. The track side details on the other hand are a strange on as some look stunning and others have no detail and just have no life within them. The frame rate is not what I would call solid either and can be a mixed bag and that’s another problem with the game. But I will say that this is easily one of the best rally games I've played in a good few years but after all these words all I really had to say is that if you love racing games and have an interest in WRC you need this game in your life. If you have no interest in either of these then I'd say save your money. Call of Duty is out soon enough.