Game Reviews

Games centred around the world of the FIA World Rally Championship were all the rage back in the PSOne and early PlayStation 2 days. Indeed, there were several breeds of popular Rally game knocking about in the late 1990s and early  2000s. V-Rally, Colin McRae Rally, Official World Rally Championship and the awesome SEGA Rally all vied for the number one spot. In the end, it was Colin McRae (which would eventually become the DiRT series of games) and the licensed FIA WRC games that would survive the early Rally war. When the PlayStation 2 launched, WRC was still very popular, and the fact that WRC was a PS2 exclusive on launch was a system seller. Fast forward 10 years and the series has gone multi-platform, with development switching from Evolution Studios to the Italian based Milestone. Here we have Milestone’s third WRC effort, but how does it stack up against its only off road competitor, the comprehensively awesome DiRT 3 from Codemasters?

GRAPHICS: WRC 3 is a game that feels pretty middle of the road in terms of its looks. It is pretty short on “wow” moments, while never really letting itself down. Games of this genre tend to be just that though, when it comes to their looks; a bit average. What we can say about WRC 3 is that its different rally stages are exceedingly accurate, with rally stages in different countries really making you feel like you are in that country. It may sound a bit daft, but the Mexican stages in WRC 3 remind me of Red Dead Redemption, and the British stages remind me of a rainy holiday to Wales I went on when I was 14. So, kudos to Milestone for putting the effort in-in terms of localisation. It would have been easy for them to lay out the track layouts and litter them with similar surroundings, but they didn’t, and the game really benefits from it.

As a minor gripe, the games presentation away from the track feel a bit amateurish. The Menu backgrounds and loading screens look like they were drawn up by the producers five year old son, with the menus themselves being a bit of a mess to navigate.

SOUND: Unlike this year’s Formula 1 game from Codemasters, which sings a beautiful V10 song, WRC 3′s engine noises don’t sound particularly accurate, they don’t offer the same feel as those seen in other titles. Here, engine notes sound muffled and familiar across engine sizes, with only the volume and pitch changing now and then, it’s as if its the same bank of sounds being used across the vehicles, with some layer of audio being laid on top of a singular sound. A Citroen C2 shouldn’t sound the same as its Turbocharged big brother the DS3R. Music wise, the game is backed up by the obligatory dub-step and electro inspired soundtrack. Yippee.

GAMEPLAY: As you would imagine, WRC 3 is all about the Rally. You may think that is an obvious thing to say about a rally game, but with the way other racing games diversify of late with all manner of race modes, to see that WRC 3 sticks strictly to the race style it focuses on is a refreshing thing. There are a couple of forays into the ‘hip’ world of drift in the career mode, but these are heavily outweighed by the core rally experience.

The most heavily advertised element of this year’s entry into the WRC series is the all new “Road to Glory” game mode, in which you take a fledging driver at the start of their racing career and turn them into a racing superstar from the bottom up. So, you start in front wheel drive hatchbacks, and end up in four wheel drive monsters. Sounds easy, right? Well, no actually. Road to Glory provides a stern challenge, one that starts easy enough yet quickly shows its teeth as the difficulty level increases. In Road to Glory, you compete in events of many different car categories, earning stars upon completion of each event. Coming in the top 7 at any given event rewards stars, with the highest places giving out the most stars. Stars are also given out on the back of skill points you can earn while hacking round the rally stage. The difficulty comes in to play when you realise you need to earn enough stars to unlock the next event, which means going back and earning a top three place in a couple of the events you did back at the start of the campaign so that you can progress. It might sound frustrating, but it works in your favour as your driving skills steadily increase.