There is something about rallying that is inherently exciting in concept. It is about driving fast on very tight courses while there are hazards on every side, including in front of you. I would compare it to F1, but there is a different feeling behind that. For Formula 1, you are driving around wide and bendy circuits at high speed while trying to get around a car that costs millions. It is fight or flight moments that keep you in the race. For rallying, it is less about speed and precision and more about listening to a German bloke talk about “Sechs” like the pervert he is.

Yes, I know I’m about a month late on the review, but I’ve been busy fighting with the co-driver. That, I think, is one of the most annoying things about actually doing rallying. You have to listen to someone shouting in your ear in a whole other language that you were never taught. “Left, over crest, 6, right 60, 200, flat 200, finish,” it all makes about as much sense as every lawyer that tells you the draconian details of the language in a contract. I’ve better understood the BBC’s Shipping Forecast, and half of that is made up on the spot!

Nonetheless, WRC 9 is the 16th official World Rally Championship series game. Yes, I’ll never understand the naming convention either. This series alone has two 4s, two 3s, and one 2 with the other 2 in roman numerals. It is also my second (maybe third) time playing a game in the series, and I’m still hopeless at listening to a man yelling directions in my ear at velocity speeds for dislodging Alvin, Simon, and Theodore from their tree at the bottom of the ravine.

Ok, I think that’s enough poking and prodding, I should talk about the actual game. It’s good – if you are out of your mind. What human being with a working brain thinks, “I’m going to get in a car with a German man, drive at 50 MPH towards a muddy cliff edge, and pull off a perfect handbrake turn around a bend to save us,” then gets in the bloody car anyway? You have to be off your rocker to do that. In games I am, but only in games, so don’t book me to do any of this unless you want a brown skidmark somewhere other than the dirt.

See, this is the problem with rallying, I’m not well versed enough to detail what it is about rallying that makes people do it without making it a joke. It is something so outside of my purview that it might as well be the Final Fantasy Wikipedia, I’m completely lost and I don’t know my way out. Nonetheless, I will enjoy Final Fantasy15 and similarly I will drive a car into a tree if I’m given the chance, if not to kill the German who won’t shut up. It is by complete accident, I swear, the corners sneak up on you. This isn’t any of your NASCAR business, there are more than four left turns, and they come thick and fast. A bit like the ambulances if you go off into the crowd.

I often do slide off into the crowds, down the mountains, or into the sides of trees, mostly because the driving model is a bit slippy. It is almost like you are driving on snow, ice, gravel, a little bit of tarmac, and a lot of mud. It sounds like fun until you are given your German man, who you can swap for an Irish man (speaking English), Italian, Spanish, or French man, and a Ford Fiesta. Then you are really stuck, hoping by the end of your 5-minute run that the mud on the outside will hide the excrement you left inside the car. Some of those stages are terrifying.

If you don’t know, you don’t get a test run and you don’t get a track walk. You are placed in the car with your man and told to go, that is why you have the man, he’s meant to be giving you directions. It turns out he’s only got the A-Z of the 5th dimension and lost A-T and X-Z. You might think that would be easy, but then you have this bloke shouting at you in German about jumps and degrees of bends, that’s when you realize you aren’t the driving god you thought you were. It is unbelievably hard to concentrate on his yelling and your driving. He’ll tell you about the bends, but not the trees or cliffs, the sod.

As I’ve already (to put it lightly) hinted at: The driving model is quite slipping and understandably so. There are cold, dark cliff edges with scattered gravel, muddy forests with only flickers of sunlight shining through, and snowy hellscapes otherwise known as Sweden. It is not meant to be easy, and that’s something Kylotonn Racing nailed. The pure difficulty of keeping what seems like an easy-to-drive car on a nightmare of a track. Though I will admit, for personal preference, cars should feel like they have more weight than a soaking wet kitten.

Now that I’ve gotten a bit serious: The career is very much a full-on management game that could do with a more simplified or easier to understand mode for those that just want to enjoy the game. It isn’t a Football Manager-style of the graph after graph of numbers you’d need a graphing calculator for. It is what I’d compare to WWE’s mid-2000s management modes, complex enough to give a bit of enjoyment for the boring people in the know, but utterly incomprehensible to those who want to kill a chipmunk or three. Half the time, I didn’t know what to do, so I left a majority of it alone until I was yelled at to do something.

That’s not to say the career is bad, it just lacks something to make it exciting to manage staff members. If anything, it feels like a lite version of what I’d desire from Formula 1 2020‘s My Team mode, detailed enough but lacking the ability to make me feel like I’m doing anything. Yes, mechanics will work better between stages if you are managing them properly, but beyond that, there is very little noticeable impact on decisions. Which says nothing of the calendar decisions, or as I like to call it, “Calendar, Calendar in the game, when shall I get to play the bloody game?” Often a decision of A or B, but mostly being told what to do that day.

Overall, WRC 9 is a great example of a niche being filled, it is just a shame there isn’t more pushing the game to be better in the first place. Not to discredit WRC, but it feels like it is still in the late PS2-era in all the best possible ways. If there was any true competition to the series, Kylotonn would need to put in some serious work to keep fans.

An Xbox One copy of WRC 9 was provided by Nacon for this review.

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WRC 9

$49.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Intense rallying fun.
• Camera FOV, position, and angle options.

Cons

• Every car feels like they lack some weight.
• Could use a brightness option.
• Forced ressets with little give to recover.