It would be a real lie if I said that a year later I am not disappointed with what EA Sports WRC is today and what it has offered over the last year. Not because it isn’t a good rally game, but because it is one, especially if you play it with a controller on a console. In fact, in this case I would even call it brilliant. However, it’s all of these annoying little flaws and drawbacks for those of us who take our racing simulator hobby very seriously and therefore use full-fledged racing equipment that mean that EA’s first official rally title never materializes, despite promises of countless updates really caught on as it never really reached its own potential. The graphics (via Unreal Engine 4) were never as polished as I’d hoped, real damage was never added as promised, nor was there support for three monitors, and although VR was patched earlier this year, that part of this game may be the one weakest.
That being said, Codemasters has designed increasingly accessible tracks in the rally lands since the game’s release, and the somewhat strange asphalt physics have not been fixed, which I think would have happened in December. For those who are content to drive their WRC car without the need for realism, who like driving over rocks and don’t want the car to shatter into a thousand pieces when it hits a pine tree, is the latest Codemasters project just right a joy It’s a shame that their focus on “real simulation” was compromised along the way.
Instead of releasing one game per year like Codemasters did with the Formula 1 series, last year they decided to release DLC packs with new stages and improved cars from this year’s rally season, and EA recently released Sports WRC 2024 , which for the PC requires 13 GB of hard drive space and costs 49.99 dollars. In this pack you get two new rally countries, Poland and Latvia, as well as 2024 versions of the official hybrid cars from the three WRC teams: Ford, Hyundai and Toyota. There is also a new WRC2 car with the Rally3 Fiesta Evo and a Toyota GR Yaris Rally2.
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The 2024 season (championship mode) is now split into main and final rounds like this year’s rally season, which I think is an interesting split and made me feel like it makes the real WRC a little more interesting. What isn’t really worth my time, however, are the new stages, which generally lack the danger, drama, and challenge that made Finland so challenging and exciting in the original game. There are no real dangers that can cause a puncture, there are many of them in real Poland and no fewer in Dirt Rally 2.0. There are missing stones and ditches on the side of the road. This means that as a player I can drive at excessive speeds without having to worry about the consequences of a derailment, which is even more extreme in Latvia. Of course, Rally Latvia is actually a bit like a simpler Finland, but here Codemasters has gone too far with its, in my opinion, brutally boring simplification and dilution of the drama with which the real rally is filled to the brim and for what is known.
The roads are practically twice as wide as in real life, the ditches are smoothed and flattened, and the vegetation right on the edge of the gravel is reduced to minimal to none. Overall, it looks like a golf fairway on the side of the road, and it’s never a problem to go too fast and then just pull off to the side of the road, cutting off several meters per turn. Neither Latvia nor Poland has the treacherous, rolling gravel of real racing. In the game it looks more like light brown asphalt than gravel, and there are no stones or coarse gravel on the roadsides at all, which is always a given in the real Rally Latvia. If you’ve selected the Hardcore/Realistic difficulty level, cars won’t break like they should either. I’ve had far fewer punctures in my hours of play here than I did in the same period in Dirt Rally 2.0, and in my world that’s simply a mistake.
What has improved slightly is the engine noise of the new 2024 cars, as Codemasters re-recorded the three WRC cars and added the squeak of the anti-lag system. That’s okay. It’s an improvement, but I expected more. I would have expected the sound to have improved even more over the last year, as Codemasters have obviously reduced the amount of reverb in the cup sound and made the listening portion of EA Sports WRC quieter than expected. I would have liked more engine noise, a lot more gravel on the floor/wheel well of the car and more whining noise from the sequential gearbox.
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Poland and Latvia each contain a new, long track, which is then cut, split and mirrored to make 12 tracks per country. In total, the 2024 expansion includes 27 kilometers of real new roads based on real-world rallies, and for £25 I would have expected more. Wales and Jordan should have been included here along with three iconic cars from the ’90s. Of course, if this package had been cheaper and included more challenging stages that didn’t look like something out of an arcade game, our grade would have been higher.
