There are plenty more ways to play WRC 9 than career mode. The management aspect isn’t the deepest I’ve played, though it does give you some options to maximize your team’s output on the track, and input financially. I love the design and the top-down perspective that makes it feel like a management game.
From there you can manage your crew, review objectives, test your car, review statistics, and put points into research and development. While you’re in career management view-usually between events or training-you are presented with an overhead view of your offices. WRC 9’s career mode is perhaps the core game mode, and certainly has a lot of visual appeal. Of course, if you want to get into the meat and bones of a rally career, WRC 9 has a pretty extensive option for you to try. I found myself more often forgetting about career mode so I could run a quickplay through some of these great courses. These tracks are challenging, interesting, and super fun. You’ll be driving in snow, gravel, asphalt, dirt, and plenty of mixed material courses. Set over thirteen countries, each with about nine tracks each, there is a lot of variety.
At first, I thought it would be a lot of filler, but there are some impressive courses. One of the best things about WRC 9 is its track selection. WRC 9 isn’t the most intense sim out there, but it’s a good entry-level for those who want more of a sim-like experience. Different weather conditions effect the feel of the drive as you would expect, as does various types of terrain, like gravel versus asphalt. Driving in WRC 9 is a challenge, but an adjustable one that you can fit to your realism preferences with settings like starting assist, traction control, anti-lock brakes, etc. While most racing games are more about fun and fast than realism, WRC 9 strives to be more of a sim-and it succeeds to an extent. There’s a career option for those who want to simulate every aspect of racing for an organization, or you can forget all of that and just worry about racing. There’s no rallycross and beyond in WRC 9, just traditional rally across over a dozen countries each with nine or so tracks.
It’s also a series that is almost as long-lived as the Colin McRae Rally series-which has been going by Dirt recently. WRC 9 is all about rally-and it’s the official game of the 2020 World Rally Championship. WRC 9 is an impressive step into next gen, and a surprisingly good rally game. That is, until I got the chance to play WRC 9 on Xbox Series X. With the exclusion of a proper rally mode in Dirt 5, I thought I had to stick with Dirt Rally 2.0 for my rally fix. Before I started playing various racing games, I’m not even sure if I could have told you what rally was-but it’s probably one of my favorite types of racing now.
Most of what I know about racing, I learned from video games.