WRC 10 Review - A Solid Lap Around The Track for Rally Fans

Written by Stephen Varner on September 07, 2021

Reviews: WRC 10 offers something for both the hardcore and casual alike, however, the hardcore racing fan might feel more at home.

The thing that became very clear quite quickly when starting my career in WRC 10 is that this is not a game for casual racing fans, or rather its primary modes of play are geared heavily towards the type of player that wants to completely immerse themselves in a racing career. This is a bit of a double-edged sword and that’s not to say it's impenetrable for newcomers by any means, however. There are enough tutorials, explanations, and options to get virtual petrol heads acclimated to this particular set of wheels. The flip side is that once you get a little mud on your proverbial tires or if you're a rally race regular you'll have a deep career mode that will keep you engaged for weeks and months to come.

Now, if you're new to the series or new to rally racing in general you're going to want to get acclimated because first and foremost WRC is about simulation. There's a litany of training events and challenges to complete both gravel and asphalt road types that can help you get a feel for how the cars handle, which for me anyway was a bit of a sticking point on a controller. The game has wheel support of course but I did find that the default gamepad controls for steering felt a little too twitchy and was a little too easy to over-correct my turns and drifts. A quick tweak to the stick sensitivity in the options menus however cleared that right up and I was making edge of control slides as intended in no time.

Once you're ready to begin your solo career in earnest you'll have a couple of options. Of course you can just jump into quick play and customize exactly what kind of event you want to have from location to weather or you begin by starting either a Season or Career campaign. The biggest difference between them being how much of the off-track stuff you want to simulate and manage. In either case, you'll be prompted to start on either Junior WRC or WRC 3 and work your way up to the big leagues. Progression is key here and locked behind working your way through the lower-tier events and cars. This may be frustrating for returning players that want to jump straight into the top-tier Rally Championship in solo mode but what I found even more strange was how even the livery selections were locked behind progression and challenges in the career modes. For those that are much more talented than me in the editor fear not, all basic shapes are available from the beginning, and for those with a deft touch they'll no doubt be able to pull off some incredible designs with the 500 layer limit. It's a bit of truncated editor when compared to something like Forza perhaps but should still be more than sufficient for most players, which honestly makes the decision to lock most stickers behind stuff like completing 10 events in split-screen or multiple seasons in the top WRC category seem arbitrary.

Despite the strange caveats the season and career modes are meaty and the career mode, in particular, is almost half racing game half management sim. You'll pick how to spend time on your calendar and manage team personnel as well as keep track of sponsor objectives and progress an R&D tree that’s large and branching enough to put some RPGs to shame. If all of that seems like fluff you'd rather not be bothered with you can still get a more straightforward driving focused experience by running the Season mode instead which simply has you manage your car from race to race and keep your head on the track instead of over start sheets and personnel perks. This isn't to say that there’s a lack of things to manage even if you're just focused on the driving side. Things like tire selection and repair management are going to be critical. Even the first race at Monte Carlo is going to go badly if you don't pack the right set of tires for the snow capped mountain tops or keep your headlights intact before a night race where you don't get a repair period in between events. Racing fast is as much about racing carefully and managing wear as it is pushing every corner to its limit.

New to this year you'll also get the 50th anniversary mode. This series of events is presented as a timeline of historically significant races that you'll relive through timed challenges with the relevant cars and locations. It's a cool way to experience some of the significant events through the history of WRC but winds up being time trial objectives with a paragraph or so of historical context. It's neat and hopefully the kind of thing they can expand on in the future because it's a great way to experience a lot of variety in one place in terms of cars and locations but it doesn't do much more to place you in the relevant time period. Crowds of fans where every other person has an LCD screen camera long before they were invented is surely a nitpick and it ultimately doesn't take much away from the experience but it's the little things that can go a long way.

The game looks and performs well on Xbox Series X and there’s enough variety in the locations you'll visit around the world that you'll always have a chance to marvel at how pretty something is. Despite occasional screen tearing and environmental pop in I think the game looks really pretty nice overall and having the chance to race from Sweden to Chile and New Zealand to Kenya on almost every continent provides more than enough variety to always keep me engaged with new types of environments to look at. Lighting goes a long way for this and night races, in particular, are appropriately terrifying. You're only ever a bump or two away from smashing your only source of light and being blind, which can make for a harrowing experience. Co-driver commentary can get a little repetitive but I did want to call it out an instance where I was flipping end over end off the track and down a hill when he calmly said “I don't have notes for this bit” which was one of the most unintentionally hilarious instances I've had so far and honestly a welcome break from the usual gasps and “let's get back on track" lines you normally get.

WRC 10 is a really solid rally simulator and its rough edges don't do that much to detract from the overall experience. The deep solo career options and tight handling model ultimately outweigh the head scratching decision to lock certain things behind progression and there are enough ways to play around with the Group B monsters of both past and present to sate the appetite of rally fans that didn't quite get the experience they were perhaps looking for with the Dirt series taking a much more arcade racing approach last time out.