It sounds complex and involved, yet the game keeps it simple enough that those generally uninterested in such features – such as myself – can largely let these things play themselves without too much engagement.Īnd if you want to streamline the experience, the adjacent Season mode offers basically the same experience minus the crew management aspect. In addition to racing and training, you’re required to deal with the day-to-day business of racing – of hiring a crew and managing their morale, keeping sponsors pleased, paying bills, building an R&D tree, and finally, tweaking your car. The mode sure to take up most of your time in WRC 9 will be Career, which takes you through the ranks of the WRC. Again, as someone who struggles with pacenotes at the best of times, it provided a whole other level of guided feedback, and absolutely made me a better racer. In locomotion, there’s an enormous amount of control over your trigger depression, allowing you to lithely feather the acceleration during especially hairy portions of a track. Push the brakes too hard, though, and the game will let you know about it with a rat-a-tat sensation. It creates a sand-in-your-toes tactile quality quite unlike anything I’ve ever felt in a racing game, while in the adaptive feedback stakes, the right acceleration trigger pushes back as the car changes gears, and the left brake trigger will require a little extra squeeze to slam to a stop. You’ll feel an intense rumble over the surface of the controller as you skid across icy terrain, and a distinctly more granular sensation as you speed atop gravel.
A diverse library of sound effects are pumped through the controller as your car rattles around the courses, but the DualSense really comes into its own where the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers are concerned. Given the propensity for screwing up, though, it’s a shame there isn’t an instant restart option for races as opposed to the common sense approach of restarting tracks with a tap or two of the touchpad, you have to confirm through two menus before being allowed to restart, which feels relatively tedious for a title on new-gen hardware.īut again, we return to the star of WRC 9 – the DualSense controller, which is a transformative enough piece of kit to make this highly competent racer so much more memorable than it otherwise would be. This is not the sort of hypnotic racer like Dirt 5 where you can quickly find a zen-like sense of flow and simply zone out you need to concentrate at almost all times, yet the vehicular handling nevertheless feels fair in its realism. Courses are littered with bumpy roads and hairpin turns sure to have you instinctively swerving your body like a lunatic, the tracks seemingly committed to pulling you off the road with even a relatively minor mistake.
It is, in my limited knowledge, a fairly routine rally simulation game, albeit an accessible one that I was able to (mostly) follow, no matter how terrible I am at reading pacenotes.įor sure, this is a technical racer, filled with treacherous routes across countries as disparate as Monte Carlo, Portugal, Finland, Mexico, New Zealand, Wales, Turkey, Sweden, Kenya, and Japan.
Wrc 9 ps4 review series#
This is my first dive into the WRC franchise, so I couldn’t even begin to compare it to prior entries in the series or really other rally titles, but I can attest that WRC 9 is a whole lot of fun speaking as someone who finds the technical minutiae of simulation racers painfully dull. The DualSense has already been dubbed a game-changer for many disparate genres, but from my own play-testing its most intuitive and tactile utility just might be in racing games, as terrifically exemplified here. I’ll preface this review by confessing upfront that I’m not much of a rally racing game guy I flirted with the Colin McRae Rally series in my younger years and gave Dirt Rally a go in VR, but I tend to gravitate more towards arcade-skewing racers like the recently-released Dirt 5.īut the positive early word on WRC 9′s implementation of the PS5’s DualSense controller drew me in immediately, and I’m so glad it did.
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