Joy and Happiness: WRC 6 is now a PC, PS4 and Xbox One game, which means the PS3-style graphics are gone for good. But is this the case? As always, the first impression is based on the physical and we admit that with WRC 6, we initially did not know what to think. Ugly and full of bugs when it was released in the console versions, we approached the game on PC once a good part of the first patches were released. Concretely, we find a game that looks very similar to WRC 5, but with some improvements. Firstly, the car looks a little prettier with less aliasing, although the modeling quality is far from genre heavyweights like Dirt Rally. Same thing with faces that are simply not modeled at all. Each pilot will therefore spend his entire career hidden behind his owl (balaclavas with two fireproof holes) and helmet screwed on his head. Same thing during the podiums where the champagne shower will be helmeted! At this level, we imagine that it is not worth talking to you about the cardboard puppets that come alive on the side of the roads. You understand where we are coming from. But not everything is good to throw away, far from it. Among the biggest improvements, we notice that the vegetation is now almost pretty. When you know that the flora makes up 90% of the decor of the Specials, this is not a detail to be overlooked. Bushes and trees are quite realistic, including in their physics since we can overtake the road and pass through small groves. So try to cross a tree trunk to see!
A GAME THAT TURNS IN CIRCLES?
However, even in the case of a tree trunk, you should be able to get away with it, the fault of a very permissive damage system, even when everything is set to Hard and realistic. If we are delighted with the return of punctures which force you either to lose 30 seconds to change wheels, or to finish the stage on the rim, the rest is not really up to par. On a frontal impact at 50 km/h in a cut stone wall, we managed to bend the front bumper a little. Before damaging the suspension slightly, we had to go full throttle in Ouninpohja and take a jump really too fast. Nothing enough to really impact handling. Basically, before screwing up your car to the point of not reaching the finish, or even to the point of not having enough time to repair it in the parc fermé, you will have to do it on purpose. Too bad for realism, novices and arcade enthusiasts will rejoice. Moreover, although we were promised narrower roads, you really have to look to find them, most of the time you will find specials as wide as boulevards on rallies. Not enough to offer a real challenge here either, especially since the number of routes is very small.
Universal problem of the rally game, the number of Specials is always too limited. WRC 6 is no exception to the rule since if a rally offers you between six and eight stages (compared to fifteen in reality) spread over three days, you quickly realize that there are no more than three or four tracks great maximum that we will do again in all directions, day or night. Artifices to hide reality from us, but after a certain number of hours of play, we find that certain turns really have a taste of deja vu. The consequence is that the immersion in rally driving crumbles quickly, until you know all the Specials by heart. The Kevins, obsessed with the world rankings, will continue to turn to grab every half-second. Rally enthusiasts will put the game away for a few months in order to forget the tracks, before maybe taking it out again.
LICENSE SUSPENSION
It's a shame, however, since the game has many qualities. License requires, WRC 6 contains almost all of the official content. We find all the official teams and some privateers in WRC, a wide choice of dairies in WRC 2 and a few teams in JWRC. The WRC RGT reserved for propulsion (the 911 RGT of François Delecourt, or that of Romain Dumas) is however not present. In terms of sensations, the observation has been the same for years. If the WRCs are well made with a good behavior, the further down in category, the more the behavior of the vehicle turns out to be suspect. It will therefore be necessary to take advantage of the co-pilot to know where to go, especially at night. Pass the latter directly into its “pro” mode which makes it deliver the maximum amount of information as well as turns classified from 1 to 9, where the standard co-pilot notes from 1 to 6 without any precision. Only here, despite this rather well thought out system, the notes are quite vague, while some turns are more or less tight than announced. What about a customizable system where the player could modify the notes like real pilots do? Mystery. Nevertheless, we can console ourselves with the road behavior of the WRCs, which has really improved. As we mentioned in our preview, Kylotonn really worked on the suspensions and it shows. You can more easily place the vehicle at the turn of the wheel, while a good kick of the accelerator when the load is on the outer tire is enough to rotate the car. The piloting has thus clearly progressed, with more sensations and a better overall feeling. But the front varnish crumbles when you plug in a good force feedback steering wheel. We immediately understand that WRC 6 did not even try to be a simulation. We have a fuzzy feedback and if the sensations are necessarily better than with the controller, the gain is not as important as it should be. WRC 6 therefore retains its arcade side optimized for consoles, which even makes us prefer the game to the controller compared to the steering wheel / pedals.
OFFICIAL CONTENT A GOGO
Content level we find a basic career mode which will make you start a season in JWRC before climbing the ladder according to your results. Not very immersive, this mode will easily allow novices to set foot in the stirrup thanks to the progressiveness of the objectives and the cars. No immersion is really offered since you can hardly personalize your driver, the co-driver is provided by the team and there is no interaction with the team between rallies. We find a multiplayer mode that will make us face players on a special, knowing that we will see their ghost to prevent contact. The only way to share the track will be to play the Super Specials - which are the only ones to have been replicated on the real events - the other specials being freely inspired by the real tracks. These super specials are short and usually require you to slalom between a few cones. Not super fun in itself, but fun when facing a human opponent given the weakness of the AI. Even playing in Hard, you can easily make incredible gaps (it took 8 seconds in the Polo WRC of Ogier on Panzerplatte at the wheel of a 208 T16 of lower category) and only the expert mode will provide you with a real challenge. It should also be mentioned that the temporary challenges, which give you a try to do a time on a car and a given stage, are renewed.
