With WRC 10 you will relive the most intense moments of the rally racing Championship, from 1973 to the present day!There is something to be said about the particular breed of insanity that rally drivers possess. The WRC games have done a good job of conveying how technical and fun rally racing can be, and later this year, WRC 10 will become the latest entry in the series. I sat down and watched an online presentation of the upcoming game and then took a preview build of the game for a few spins (in at least two senses of the word). The series has historically had some solid rally gameplay, and the new game adds a couple of new features.
A big focus in terms of the new content comes in the form of the 50th Anniversary mode, a new mode that goes through the history of the World Rally Championship and features over 20 challenges that reflect real-world events. These challenges are classified into five categories: First Years, Group B, Group A, WRC, and modern WRC. Think you can reproduce a famously difficult rally stage that took place during a torrential downpour to secure a win? You will get your chance.
The game will also feature a livery editor, allowing you to customize the look of your rally car. A "sticker editor" can be used to make, save, and reuse complex things, and the overall look of your car can be used in the career mode as a private team as well as in quick races and in online challenges. It will be curious to see what people can come up with and to find out how powerful the new editor is.
There is other new content coming as well. Four brand-new rallies are coming to the game (Belgium, Croatia, Estonia and Spain) as well as 22 legendary cars. Take to the dirt in rides like the 1973 Ford Escort Mk II, a 1997 Subaru Impreza WRC, and other cars that made their mark in the WRC from 1973 to the present. The game will have 19 environments and over 120 rally stages, with over 40 of them new to the series. This includes 12 new historical rallies, such as Italy's Sanremo, which can be played in its 1981, 1997, and 1998 configurations.
WRC 10 is touted as making many improvements over the previous title. The physics model is based on the one from WRC 8, with a new suspension model and with new aerodynamic features such as the ground effect of airflow passing under the car at speed. The game is said to include new car sounds; a criticism of previous titles in the series was that many sounds were overly reused between cars. Finally, the game will support the PS5 controller's haptic feedback to help players literally get a better feel for the game.
After the presentation, I accessed a preview build of the game to see how some of the systems have been improved. The build was limited to quick play and on three environments, but it was enough to figure out that the improvements to the physics model seem to be legitimate. My previous experience with the series was with WRC 8, the game the physics model is purportedly from, and it feels as though WRC 10 kept the parts that work and fixed the parts that didn't. The car handling felt weighty yet agile, and I did not have any issues of weird geometry causing my car to behave unexpectedly.
There was a lot that the WRC 10 preview build did not have, such as anything regarding the historical content or the career mode. Those are big draws to the game, so I remain very curious to check those out in the future. From June 16 through June 22, you can check out the same preview build of WRC 10 that I did as part of the Steam Next Fest. Beyond that, WRC 10 has a release date of Sept. 2, 2021, so the end of summer can't get here soon enough.
Previewed on: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB RAM, NVidia GTX 2070 Super
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