If you’re not into the pressure of having to impress and manage a team and just want to race, then Season mode is probably the place for you to start. But I suppose that’s one of the harsh realities of trying to make a living as a rally driver. When that happens, your season ends and you have to start the whole season over again. In fact, after just that second rally, my manufacturer decided to drop me for poor performance. I took 10th place! I even got a single point in the standings! I thought to myself, “surely this will improve my reputation with my team!” But I couldn’t have been more wrong. By this point, I was starting to hit my stride. I did another training and something called an “extreme conditions” event, where you simply have to make it to an end point in a half-broken car in the dark during a downpour, and then went into my second rally. My reputation with my car’s manufacturer went down a few points, but I didn’t think much of it. It was my first race and I didn’t come in last. I found this to be a nice surprise, though, and ended up enjoying the longer length of the races.įor my first rally, out of 13 racers, I finished 12th. The lengths of time per race vary, but in general each rally has four stages, and each stage can take up to 7 minutes or longer, so when you’re ready to do a rally you should be prepared to be there for a bit. In the first hour or so of your career, you’re taken through a tutorial, including a few training tracks, and then you go into your first rally. You can add financial directors, engineers, agents, and even meteorologists to your team to give you the best chance of winning, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s even a skill tree reminiscent of an RPG-style game, allowing you to upgrade certain elements of your team or unlock new professions to add. It throws you straight into a season, allowing you to manage a team, upgrade your crew, and manage your relationship with your car manufacturer. But the game does it so well, and you have so much fun doing it, that there’s always a reward for improving.Ĭareer mode is where I started, but it might not be the best place to start for everyone. If you hit a turn even slightly wrong, congrats, you probably just flipped off the mountain and gained yourself a 9-second penalty. You will get absolutely punished for the smallest mistakes. It took me a few hours to even feel like I was halfway in control, but that’s part of the fun. Which is why once I was dropped onto a track, I was surprised by how much I immediately loved the feel of the racing.ĭon’t get me wrong, even with most of the assists on and playing on “medium,” this game is tough. I’ve dabbled in your Gran Turismos and Forza Motorsports in the past, but on the whole, “sim” type racing games generally don’t do it for me. Historically, I’ve always preferred the more “arcade-y” racing games. My entry point was the Junior WRC Championship. I also played with ABS and TCS on with a difficulty level of medium and damage effects on medium with permacrash off. Once you get into it, it quickly asks if you’re an expert, intermediate, or a novice at racing sims and I chose novice. I started the game and immediately went into career mode. This game seems like it’s going for a similar audience to the DiRT Rally games, but I’m quite happy I was able to play it from the perspective of someone who is coming in without any experience or expectations. If you’re familiar with the Autoblog Livestream you’ll know that we play all different types of racing games, but up until now, rally has never been among the subgenres. The game is absurdly fun, even for someone who's also never played a rally game. That’s why I was super excited to play the brand new World Rally Championship game, WRC 8. Before last week, I had never even heard the term “pace notes.” I’m a man who enjoys new things, especially in video game form. The height of my knowledge is basically just that Travis Pastrana used to race some form of a rally car at the X Games every once in a while, and that’s about it. Let’s get this out of the way right off the top: I know absolutely nothing about rally racing. 9/11/19 Update: We've been told that the developers of WRC 8 are currently working on a patch that will be available for the Xbox within a week's time to address the shutdown issue mentioned in the review below! I've been super impressed with the WRC 8 team's attentiveness and responsiveness to this issue and I'm excited to update the review with our impressions after the patch is live!
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