izigame.me

I spend a lot of time sim racing. I can tell you first hand that nearly every sim out there is a self maintained play set where you have to make your own fun. This game is actually a finished product that you can open, play, and have fun in without hassle. This game is a direct improvement over Dirt Rally 2 in every way. The stages are infinitely more realistic, the handling is better, and the career mode actually attempts to simulate a career instead of just being a series of events that scale to whatever car you're driving. You will see people in these reviews comparing this game to Richard Burns Rally (RBR), telling you to save your money and play that instead. It's the ((true sim experience)) after all. The true sim experience means spending 2 hours setting up a 10-20 year old game to work with fan mods so you can run time trials over and over again on a program that feels like its barely functioning because it has marginally more realistic physics. I've done it and it's fun, but frankly rally isn't my main choice of motor sport, and I don't want to have to reconfigure wheel and game settings every time I want to do it. Neither does anyone who's new to this hobby, and anyone who hasn't already gotten past the several hundred dollar barrier to entry for a sim setup is going to be scared off by it. This is a sim that is also a video game. It has progression, challenges, pretty good tutorials, and engaging game play. To be completely honest I'm not particularly swayed by these claims that the game isn't realistic, because none of these people have ever driven these cars and this is much more in line with how I would expect them to perform. There's also videos of real rally drivers driving their cars in this game and saying the grip felt correct. Surely sim racers wouldn't argue with actual race car drivers about the characteristics of their cars. That's definitely never happened before right? That would just be absurd now wouldn't it. Now, talking about what the actual game is like, I'll start with the stages.
I played a decent amount of Dirt Rally 2 (never got the chance to play previous WRC games), and pretty much immediately I realized that they would be the biggest selling point of this game. In the Dirt Rally games (which I will refer to as DR1 and DR2 from now on) the stages were a mish mash of existing real world locations with more exaggerated features, and the roads were also pretty wide. In this game, the locations are closer to their real world counter parts than you will get with pretty much any other game, and the roadways are also mostly 1 car wide, just like the real thing. The lengths of the tracks also match their real world counter parts, although you can select an option to run shorter versions of them if you don't want to spend 20 minutes on a stage. They're fast, they're technical, and they're exhilarating. I've seen some say that they are boring, but I disagree. I think if you could go fast on fictional tracks that were more technically intense due to being shorter, and you play a recreation of a real track and find it easy, you're probably just a better driver than you realize. I think it's a very common occurrence within the sim racing community to mistake difficulty for realism. Racing is hard, but making it harder doesn't automatically make it more realistic.
Playing DR1 and 2 I rarely ever felt like my car was gripping the surface below me. It felt like I was constantly in a state of 100% wheelspin gliding over the track and guiding my car in the direction I wanted it to go in. This was especially bad on tarmac, it felt like driving over smooth ice. In this game the cars feel like they are really biting into the surface underneath, and its an absolute dream to play. Tarmac is downright addictive in this game, and hitting a well executed handbrake turn never gets old. Paired with the longer, more realistic stages this is the most intensely enjoyable rally experience I've ever had. Everything works out of the box and feels great. RBR had a better damage model and feels marginally more "realistic" I guess but the amount of effort it takes to keep it maintained and running isn't worth it to me for the amount of content it actually offers. In terms of wheel feel it's not as good as assetto corsa (nothing ever is), but it does the job and gets the message across well enough. Can't speak to controller as I haven't tried it yet. The actual physics model its self is very satisfying.
If you've played either of the DR games you'll know that the careers are pretty bare bones. You'd buy a car, race it, earn money, upgrade or buy a new car, repeat infinitely. It worked but it got old quick. This game has a career mode much more akin to the F1 games (which I admittedly have not spent much time playing). When you start a career you can choose between Junior WRC, WRC2, and WRC. From there you sign with a benefactor that gives you a weekly budget for things like cars, engineers, and repairs. From there you complete tasks that raise your benefactors happiness level, which gives you higher budgets and lets you advance between the different levels of WRC. It's a great system that allows players at any skill level to get the experience they want while also getting rid of any kind of currency grind. There's no conventional money system so if you pick a car you don't like, you can just change it and the money comes out of the weekly budget. It's a great system, and I can easily see how it would be further fleshed out in future updates and future games. It can also be completely ignored if you wish. There's nothing pushing you towards it if you just want to do custom championships and time attacks.
I'd also like to take a short moment to comment on the menus. In my sim racing career I have come to despise them. I put a lot of value in a game that I can open and be in a race within 5 minutes. It's a big reason why I always kind of preferred DR1 to DR2. DR2 had a lot of menu diving and load times, and none of the information was ever conveyed that clearly. I'm happy to say that this game is as good as it gets in this aspect. Within 5 button presses you can be in an event, which makes this game great for long career sessions as well as pick up and play. A highly underrated aspect of game design at the moment in my opinion.
There's more I didn't touch on because I haven't really played with it yet. I haven't even opened the builder mode that allows you to create your own unique vehicles but it sounds neat. The moments mode sounds cool too, and I haven't looked at the online at all yet. There's a lot to do.
In conclusion, if you want to play a sim that is also a video game, this is a good buy. It's 50 dollars (30 less than the new average retail price for a game), has a good amount of content, a great career mode, handles beautifully, and is an all round good time. This game is a step in the right direction for the genre, and I hope we see more games as good as this within the near future. It's been very dry for a very long time. I know within a year or two the sim crowd will come around to this for what it is. They're very stubborn and this being published by EA dictated a lot of peoples opinions before it ever even came out.
(P.S. I've seen the complaints about performance issues. On an RTX 3060ti and Ryzen 7 5700 with default settings the games never dropped below 60 for me. Hopefully whatever issues are there get patched out but I haven't been experiencing them.)