Recent reviews by LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION

Happily, WRC 6 is an improvement over WRC 5. For the third time around, I went through a full career starting from Junior WRC all the way to becoming a WRC champion with no assists, using an Xbox One controller, in first person, using manual gearbox on hard difficulty.

Sadly, the number of retries is still tied to the difficulty level. Having more experience with Kylotonn’s rally physics, I did give Expert a chance again to test myself, but the endeavour became frustrating as soon as I noticed that the A.I. are competitive on some stages and, at least to me, impossibly quick on others. As such, I still completed most of the career on Hard.

This time, I worked on setups. Halfway through the WRC2 class I realised that some of the default setups weren't good enough. I started by working on gear ratios and then moved to other options as my confidence grew. I recommend fiddling with the setups, as the UI is quite newbie-friendly and doesn’t overwhelm with numerical values or 50 adjustable steps for every parameter.

We finally have some functional physics to play with. Braking still feels too safe, but it’s not entirely foolproof. Damage does affect the cars’ handling and performance before the components of the cars are absolutely ruined. Most notably, the cars can become greatly unsettled after landing jumps if the suspension is damaged and engine damage results in noticeable power losses. The handbrake is still somewhat useless, but can be improved by adding a tick or two to its strength in the setup menu. I did that for every stage in the game, regardless of the road surface. Lastly, the cars feel much closer to their real-life performance compared to WRC 5. Overall, the physics are a big improvement, but they are nothing to write home about.

There are good news on the stages front. Compared to WRC 5, they actually vary in road width and some are actually somewhat bumpy. The differences between driving surfaces are much more pronounced and somewhat simulate what they might feel like in real life. Rain also has an effect on overall grip. What’s worth mentioning for WRC 6 are the SSS stages. These were missing entirely from WRC 5 and are a very welcome addition. They are challenging and, when they’re not the only stage in a day in career mode, force you to rethink your setups, making the whole experience surrounding them even more engaging.

On the weirdness front, addressing some issues in WRC 5, tyres finally ‘last’ more than 3 km, which certainly helps one feel better, as seeing that damage bar empty after a stage in WRC 5 makes one feel as if you’re doing a poor job conserving them. Secondly, ‘goes hard’ is gone – the co-driver actually specifies how much tighter or wider a corner becomes. No more guessing what’s (literally) coming around the corner. I recommend keeping the calls on 'very early'.

Sadly, the turbo pressure bar under the speedo in the UI doesn’t have any purpose – it just fills up at the beginning of a stage and stays like that until its end. Lastly, the dirt buildup on the windscreen is just atrocious. The dirt builds up almost instantly, even on asphalt, forcing you to drive most stages with the wipers on permanently.

The single-player modes also include a driving test that is a cool challenge for when you’re newer to the game. Functionally, it’s meant to suggest what assists you should leave on, but I don’t trust its judgement too much.

Multiplayer still works peer-to-peer. This time, I didn’t find anyone online via matchmaking and had to resort to the community tab to find fellow drivers willing to help me with the multiplayer achievements. Judging by the look of the main menu, the game also used to have some sort of events which are now defunct. They would have been a welcome addition, had they still been functional. Local multiplayer is also available in either hot seat or split-screen mode. Both are very welcome features as far as I’m concerned.


Good news - the game can actually be minimized as intended this time around. Everything is alright in the visuals/graphics department. I had no performance issues and didn’t spot any weird visual glitches or artefacts. There are clear graphics improvements over WRC 5 that include better-looking distant foliage and environments, markedly improved lighting and higher fidelity car textures. Visual damage is still there and it still looks good.


On menu music – there are some actual beats playing when starting the game that fade into the background as you navigate the main menu. They are appropriate and make you feel excited to play the game. As for the rest of WRC 6, there is no music during replays or while sitting in service. In the latter situation, that leaves space for crowds and other cars to make noise, which helps the overall immersion. Some music also plays during the rally-end podium sequences.

On car sounds - there is little improvement over WRC 5, sadly. Surface sounds are great, tyre sounds are great, the exhaust pops are still there, even the cars’ turbos sound good when relieving pressure in external cams during replays, but the cars’ engines still sound unbelievably boring, samey and uninteresting no matter the class. Pretty disappointing.


Achievements. 100% completion of achievements is impossible unless you have the ‘Spy’ in-game accomplishment already. Overall, the accomplishments system seems completely useless.

A worthy mention is the ‘Navigator’ achievement that requires one to drive 5000 km in total. This is, without a doubt, the most dull and outright soul-crushing achievement I have ever run into. For the record, I think I was on around 1200 km total after playing four full career seasons, with two of them taking place in the WRC class. I think that was after 35 in-game hours. I have now reached 59 in-game hours and have barely passed 2400 km overall after finishing all the other ‘Drive X km on surface Y’ achievements. There are no words to describe how grindy this achievement is. Actually, I am writing this review because I have already moved on to WRC 7 and am starting to forget what 6 was like outside of this mindless grind. Luckily, 100% accomplishments is not possible for me, which saves me from going for the extremely grindy accomplishments requiring hundreds of both offline and online stage wins. The rest of the achievements are plain and uninteresting.

DLC. I cannot recommend the calendar and WRC+ bundle. The calendar has a big watermark ad in one corner and WRC+ is now defunct as a service, so the code for it is useless. The Yaris test car is a great addition for quick stages/multiplayer. Sadly, at times, it’s missing the rubber lining around its windscreen, side windows and back window, both in third-person and first-person view.

Immersion. Once again, great improvements over WRC 5. Podium celebrations are back. They are a bit soulless, but their presence is appreciated. The only negative aspect are some car engines’ idle tones covering up most of the sound made by the crowds. I’m not sure why the cars’ engines have to be on during the podium ceremony... Also, short pre-stage scenes are present showing the car before the player’s taking off at the start of the stage. It helps make the game feel less lonely, especially with all the people around. The addition of manual wipers and headlights is welcome, too, although it feels like the excessive dirt buildup on the windscreen was included to create an artificial challenge and 'advertise' this feature.


I think WRC 6 is what WRC 5 was intended to be if given enough development time. It feels like a finished game. It’s functional, fun, has fairly in-depth mechanics, some very time-consuming achievements and random difficulty spikes on the highest difficulty. I recommend purchasing it if you want to play ‘a rally game’. If you’re looking for a good or great rally game, maybe look somewhere else.

Started playing this one as soon as I got through the better part of the WRC2 class in WRC4.


I haven't found WRC 5 to be much fun, honestly. Once again, I went through a full career starting from Junior WRC all the way to becoming a WRC champion, no assists, Xbox One controller, first person, manual gearbox, this time starting with the hard difficulty from the very beginning.

The first feature I wasn't fond of was retries being tied to the difficulty level. Having reached the WRC class, I found myself in an area where I could comfortably beat the other drivers on Hard, but winning on Expert would have required me to play in a way that would have put my vehicle at great risk. Expert difficulty does not offer one the option of restarting a stage, which I find needlessly punishing. As such, I sailed my way through the game on Hard just for the sake of being able to restart stages once.

Once again, I felt no need to adjust any of the default setups, just like in WRC 4.

This one is as arcade as it gets. It literally feels like you can do nothing wrong. Brakes are super strong, cars are rather resilient even on the highest damage setting and, yet, the handbrake feels useless. It's really easy to play, but it can be inconsistent. Also, it's allergic to very high jumps. Seriously. If you know a big jump is coming up, brake! Not doing so might ruin your whole stage/rally in a very goofy way.

As for the stages, they are also rather forgiving. Coming from WRC 4, I found myself unable to compete at first because I was driving too carefully. I think the WRC Junior car (capable of reaching a top speed of 200 km/h, btw) is faster than the WRC2 cars in WRC 4. The roads are wide and flat almost all the time, making the game feel like you're driving either on tarmac or less-grippy tarmac that makes noises. Once again, damage seems to have no effect on handling until you actually critically damage a part of the car.

Other weirdness included the tyres being fried after any stage longer than 3 km, which just feels weird, and the co-driver being rather unhelpful. What I mean by the latter is that he has his 'goes hard' indication, which means that the corner increases in sharpness. However, he never clarifies how hard. So sometimes you might go barrelling into a 6 and end up flying off a cliff because the corner tightened into a 1, whereas, at other times, you might be braking heavily through a 5 for fear the 'goes hard' might mean it tightens into a 2, when, actually, it's just a slightly more acute 5. Even though you might set him to 'very early' calls, if you drive fast enough on some stages, he cannot keep up. Also, he starts from a very weird point in the past whenever your car resets on track. Lastly, I know for a fact that there is a 3 left note missing on one of the Rally Argentina stages.

Aside from that, it also seems like none of the onboard tachometers match the actual cars' engines' redlines. You can rev any car in the game way past what the tach shows as the max and there are no consequences. As such, if you're shifting manually, you're better off doing it judging by the engines' sounds.

A positive on the gameplay side is the presence of weather. WRC 5 actually features night stages, mist, rain and snow, with many stages allowing you to pick between them in Quick Play mode.

The single-player modes also include quick stage, allowing you to choose one specific stage to play, quick rally, the same thing, but with a rally, and rally school, which teaches you the basics. It might be useful to go through the latter so you may get used to the strange physics this game has...

This time around, multiplayer is still available peer-to-peer, so, if you can find someone to play with, the game will allow you to play in the same lobby. I have found random people playing the game only once in my 30+ hours of play. The racing is as you would expect. The other player(s) is/are ghosted and you all tackle the same stage at the same time. What baffled me is that the game actually crashes for no reason before starting a multiplayer stage sometimes.


This time around, all the visual options you might expect are available (FPS cap, screen mode, Vsync, detail level and resolution). The only issue here would be that minimizing the game in fullscreen mode and maximizing it will change your resolution to a lower one, switch the game to windowed mode and turn the whole game into a box on your screen.

So WRC 5 is somewhat newer than WRC 4. F1 2015, for instance, still looks somewhat decent today. However, that is not the case here. Sure, the graphics have improved from WRC 4, but the environment looks very poor at mid to high distances. You might not notice it if you have your eyes glued on the road, but the poor quality textures really come out of the woodwork when watching replays. The cars look fine for 2015, nothing to write about here. Body deformation is present once again and it's alright.


The audio part is another one of WRC 5's failings. The menu music is rather plain and I don't think there even is any sort of soundtrack or background music playing at any point in time during the game. If there was, it was so unremarkable that I cannot remember it.

The cars' engines sound rather samey and there is absolutely no auditive feedback when downshifting. It genuinely feels as if the copilot is pressing a clutch pedal somewhere while you are braking and downshifting. The only positive I would list here would be the presence of pops coming from the exhaust. Those are a welcome addition.


Achievements. This time around, 100% achievements is possible, provided you can find someone to help you with the few multiplayer achivements. However, be wary of the "Explorer" achievement, which requires you to play every stage in the game in Quick Play mode. That one genuinely felt like an insult after playing some rallies as often as three times! throughout the career mode. About 30% of my game time was just playing every stage all over again in Quick Play. It's a huge slog and the game is not enjoyable enough to make it even bearable. Otherwise, the achievements are uninspired and the ones involving replicating real-life feats are gone.

DLC. This game features some DLC... some strange-looking cars and 13 extra stages or so. I bought the game alongside all the DLC, so I can't tell which stages were DLC, but I'm pretty sure they are not part of the career mode and can only be played in Quick Play or Multiplayer. The same goes for the concept cars - only available in Quick/Multiplayer modes.

Honestly, I can't recommend any of it, even when it's very cheap. I didn't enjoy the game enough to want to play more...

Immersion. This part presents both advantages and downsides compared to WRC 4. There are no more e-mails or press clippings, but there are helicopters above stages and changing team morale actually impacts your cars' repair times. On the negative side, the podiums are gone. Winning a rally or a championship just results in a graphic being shown on-screen, which is extremely disappointing. Headlights and windscreen wipers are automatic. This is both a blessing and a curse. It's nice because it spares two additional buttons, but it's a huge pain when you're on a dirt stage and you are forced to drive while looking through a windscreen that is covered in dirt splatters. The wipers turn on only during rain and snow.


Overall, WRC 5 was rather awful. I hate being harsh with it, as, to me, it gives off 'there wasn't enough development time available' vibes. It just feels like an unfinished game and it's not particularly enjoyable. It's functional, but I doubt it's something anyone might want to play willingly. As such, I recommend avoiding it unless you are adamant about following the development of the WRC franchise through the years.

Grabbed this for dirt cheap during a Steam sale alongside WRC 5 and 6.


Gameplay-wise, I found WRC 4 to be fun and challenging. I played it in first person, on an Xbox One controller, with no assists, starting from the lowest difficulty all the way to the highest during one career that started in Junior WRC. The last difficulty is beatable, but challenging. I never touched the setups and I appreciated the fact that difficulty and the number of restarts are different options. That allowed me to pick 4 or 6 restarts on the highest difficulty in order to try and risk more to obtain a better time and end up in a higher position on the leaderboard.

It is of note that this is an arcade rally game. By no means could it be considered a simulation, at least in my opinion, having played Dirt Rally 2.0.

There is a good variety of stages (I don't watch WRC, so I can't comment on their accuracy), the roads vary in width and they feel appropriately bumpy. The physics are forgiving, I feel, and damaging the cars was never an issue. I rarely had severe accidents, but I never felt like light or medium damage affected the handling of the cars. I took keeping the car as intact as possible as a sort of a personal challenge rather than a way of avoiding penalties.

The single-player modes also include quick play, which sets up a random stage, and rally mode, that can be used to play a single stage, a single rally or a whole championship.

Multiplayer is no longer functional in any capacity, so I cannot evaluate that component of the game.


To start off, the maximum resolution available is 1900 x 1200. I have a 2560x1440 monitor, so I played the entire game with a black box around it. However, max FPS options are available all the way to 144 FPS.

The graphics aren't stellar by today's standards, but the game looked good to me, considering its age. The FX are appropriate, cars get dirty, exhausts backfire and there are plenty of objects and spectators around the stages. Lastly, the cars get visibly damaged after accidents.


Speaking of the auditive experience, one must begin with the menu music. There is only one track that gets old after you boot the game the 6th time around. There are very few background tracks in general in the game, leading to them becoming quite boring/annoying in the long run. I enjoyed the car sounds. Just like in the graphics section, they are not mind-blowing, but they are appropriate. Downshifts are audible, tyres squeal and the higher class cars have clear straight-cut gear whines.

Regarding the audio issues others have mentioned, I did a bit of testing and, at least in my case, the audio cutting out completely after completing one or two stages happened only when having the FPS set to 144. 120 FPS and below was perfectly fine for me, so that might be a solution for others, too.


Achievements. There are multiplayer achievements that are no longer obtainable. Only 88% achievement completion is possible. You obtain most of the achievements by playing the career from the bottom up and some require you to replicate some real world drivers' performances, which I found to be a cool addition.

The loading screens. Because of the servers having been shut down, WRC 4 is trying to sync times with leaderboards that aren't accessible anymore. As such, you can expect a very long (2-minute long) loading screen every time you boot up the game and, occasionally, long loading times after finishing stages. I didn't find the latter to be that much of an issue.

Immersion. Immersion isn't half bad, given the age of the game. The co-driver is appropriate at all times and offers pretty accurate pace notes (their timing can be adjusted in the options screen), there are news articles you can read between stages (they become repetitive after a while, though) and you can read what other drivers are saying about you while new stages are loading. The career mode has you sitting in a nice room that acts as a menu between rallies and there is a cool showcase featuring the cars that end up on the podium at the end of every rally.


Overall, I enjoyed my time with WRC 4. I'm not a fan of the achievements only being partially unlockable, but I feel like the game is worth your time if you want to go through the WRC timeline on Steam and you don't mind the loading times. Outside of the new EA WRC titles, it's the only one in the mainline series that hasn't been made by KT Games. It's worth purchasing when it's on sale, especially if you're just getting started with arcade rally games.

Absolute buggy mess at launch - bugged cinematics, mysterious errors when trying to join multiplayer, visual errors, straight-up wrong colours on a couple of liveries of the team cars and a whole host of bugs ported over from F1 2021, including one that voids any score attained during weekly events.

It also does a poor job at adding new things to the franchise. No one cares about F1 Life, as it's mostly just a microtransaction haven, while the supercars feel absolutely awful. I am aware they can't compare to F1 cars, but I highly doubt they are anything close to this undrivable IRL. They suffer, at the time of writing, from some very strange visual issues, too (pixelated infotainment screens, end-of-trial cameras going through their bodywork to give some examples). I also suspect that their engine sounds are ported from Project CARS 2 or 3. Last negative - still no classic cars in sight.

As far as the positives are concerned, the new engine sounds are very good IMO, the visuals are good and I feel like the game runs rather well. My PC sits at around recommended specs, but I'm running the game at max settings with no ray tracing and I am experiencing very little FPS drops during actual gameplay, if any. Lastly, I enjoy the EDM soundtrack. It's been a pleasant surprise in an otherwise unimpressive yearly release.

The conclusion, to anyone pondering buying the game, would be that I recommend you to either buy F1 2020 or 2021 if you're absolutely itching for an F1 fix or to wait a few years until a more... substantial game comes out. Some of the launch issues will be ironed out, I hope (expect), but then we'd still be left with the old bugs and I, for one, can't justify dropping 60 or 80 euros on a game that won't count my progress in weekly events or that makes all my single player opponents get disqualified during safety car periods. If you want to experience the new F1 regulations at any cost and/ or have deep pockets, you can buy it, but don't expect to have to look far to find issues.