WRC 9 XBOX ONE DRIVER
WRC 9 XBOX ONE SERIES

After the six minutes of driving I finally crossed the finish line, my blue Polo a little battered and about 20 seconds behind the stage leader. There’s no minute-long intro video everytime you start the game up, nor super-pretty menus to navigate it’s clean, simple and to the point.Īfter a brief few moments of loading screens, it was time to attack the first special stage, and attack I certainly did. WRC 9 is very much a little-nonsense rally title that cuts to the chase super-quick and gets you doing the very thing you’ve bought the game for: rally. Interestingly enough, things were a little different this time around. So with that preconception in-mind, I fully expected to approach WRC 9 with a similar expectation, where I’d appreciate what the game did well and could say that rally fans would enjoy it, but once the review was done so was I. If I’m being truthful, the difficulty of rally games often meant the replay value was minimal outside the time I’d spend playing enough to review, simply because I’d be so bad at it. By that, I mean I’d regularly lose control on the course, hit whatever tree, boulder or wire fence was closest to me, and I’d miss anything close to a competitive time against even a medium-difficulty AI. The AI can be adjusted to compensate before each event in career mode, but it takes some testing to find the right range of difficulty (and that’s not as straightforward as it is in F1 2020).Rally games have been hit and miss over the past couple of years. 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.

Less ideal is the AI, the skill level of which is now determined by a slider instead of named difficulty levels. 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 levels. There seem to have been improvements made to the already excellent sound mix, too. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Triple Caution! Stay Centre!There have been a few refurbishments elsewhere, with a handful of subtle but welcome tweaks since WRC 8.

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. 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.

WRC 9 XBOX ONE DRIVER

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.

WRC 9 XBOX ONE SERIES

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. Fuel and Unusual PunishmentWRC 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. New Zealand is fantastic too, particularly the sections that wrap their way along the North Island coastline, and Japan is an incredibly taxing and technical tarmac-based rally boasting a lot of raised sections of road flanked by streams and ditches that’ll totally ruin your day.

Wrc 9 xbox one