It’s time to celebrate WRC’s 50th anniversary with WRC 10! Can you rally through the ages?? Check out our WRC 10 review!
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the championship, WRC 10 is offering a brand-new Anniversary edition, packed with new content and sensations. Relive the most intense moments from 1973 to today! WRC 10 History Mode puts your driving talents to the test through 19 historical events that require you to adapt to racing conditions of each time period.
Never-before-seen content for WRC:
– The 4 new 2021 rallies: Estonia, Croatia, Belgium and Spain
– 6 historic rallies including Acropolis, San Remo, Germany and Argentina
– 120 special stages
– 52 official teams from the 2021 season (WRC, WRC2, WRC3, Junior WRC),
– 20 legendary cars from Alpine, Audi, Lancia, Subaru, Ford, Mitsubishi, Toyota, and more…Career Mode, unanimously hailed as one of the best-developed and most complete in a racing game, has also been comprehensively upgraded and now includes a livery editor, so you can create your own team and add your colours to contemporary cars!
With a hyper-realistic and ultra-precise physics engine, WRC 10 has made the feeling of driving even better, with better aerodynamic force, turbo and braking management, on all surfaces. The sound design has also been revamped to reinforce the immersion.
A particularly competitive eSport, with daily and weekly challenges, and clubs so you can create your own competitions, drivers can measure themselves against the community at their own levels.
I’m a fan of racing games. I’m usually the one who gets to review most of them, which is great! Some are of an arcade-style nature, and others are more on the sim side. And then we have some of my favorites, which are rally racers that take you off the grid and have you focus on fighting against the course itself. If you make a mistake in a race, then it’s your fault since you don’t have to worry about other racers getting in the way. Now my previous rally racing experiences have come from the DiRT series, which is often called the Dark Souls of racing. WRC is based on an actual racing event, which certainly changes how you approach this one.
In case you aren’t familiar with rally racing, you take your finely-tuned car out on the track and must make sure you are aware of each twist and turn of the track, as well as the changes in the elevation of each section of the track. You’ll have a co-pilot in your ear letting you know about the upcoming terrain changes and the degree of the change, allowing you to prepare for it. It’s rewarding and difficult to get the feel of the different terrain you’ll explore and how to handle each one. One of the things I really liked about WRC 10 is the humanity in your co-pilot. While in other racing games, you might feel like your co-pilot acts like a GPS reading a script, for WRC 10, you really connect with your co-pilot, as it reacts to how you’re driving.
Career Mode is where you’ll likely spend most of your time with WRC 10, which is interesting. You’ll be sent through some qualifying races to choose what level you should be competing in. You get three shots at it to qualify – which I did on the last try – and it’s a true test of your driving skills since you probably won’t be familiar with this racing experience.
That being said, once you get a feel for the racing, everything just clicks. The game controls really well, with success and failure resting on your abilities and if you deserve to win a race. The way the car feels and controls over the different types of terrain is great as well. You really need to tailor your driving to the environment around you, which will always keep you on your toes. You can scale the challenge to find a good fit for yourself and what feels great as you take on the everchanging dirt roads.
There is a neat anniversary mode that you can play, which will take you to different races throughout history, featuring the different tracks and cars you would have been driving at said specific moment in time. They even went as far as to ensure things placed on the tracks were correct to that period, giving some of them a vintage feel. It’s a neat mode with some challenge to it. Sure, it’s not as meaty as the main mode, but as a bonus for this anniversary edition, it’s a welcome addition.
Now, this is the series first jump into next-gen – which, when you think about it, is now the current-gen now – and I think the team did a great job with what the game has to offer on PlayStation 5. Everything looks great, from the cars to the many tracks you’ll race through. It runs at a consistent 60 FPS. If I had one complaint, it’s that the DualSense integration. While the haptic feedback feels good with you feeling the bumps as you drive, the adaptive triggers are not used to their full potential. For some games, you’ll feel that the adaptive triggers are way too tight, while others don’t use them at all. WRC 10 falls right in the middle, which, in the end, fits the overall experience.
I was using my Pulse 3D headset while playing, and I have to mention that the developers did a great job with the overall sound mix, with sounds coming at you from all directions. Even when just using my soundbar, it sounded great as well. I loved the sound direction in this game since it helped to immerse me in the driving experience.
I liked WRC 10 a ton. It’s a polished racing experience that greatly benefits from the jump to the PlayStation 5, using the DualSense and the 3D audio from the Pulse headset to put you in the middle of the action. If you’re looking for a fun racing game that will test your skills, with a ton of content to enjoy, then WRC 10 is what you need.
Disclaimer
This WRC 10 FIA World Rally Championship review is based on a PlayStation 5 copy provided by NACON SA.
