WRC II Extreme (PS2) Review

Platform Playstation 2
Dev Co: Evolutions Studios (Liverpool)
Publisher: Sony
Release (UK): 29 Nov 2002
Review code: Pal / Europe
Wide screen mode: Yes
S/Sound : No
60Hz: No
Online content: No

Finally, you can take a powerful WRC car over highly detailed terrain and feel every bump and rock of the Cypriot roads. Or maybe go blindingly fast over the smooth asphalt of Corsica and panic as you realise an off-camber bend has taken you off guard. Quite simply, if you think Rally Trophy rocks and Rally Championship rolls, this game is definitely for you. It’s the best simulator of rally racing available. It’s called WRCII Extreme. I can tell you now, it should have been called WRCII Hardcore.

This game is not about learning the tracks, it’s about pushing the car as hard as you dare over new, unseen territory, and getting away with it. It’s a brilliant risk/reward balance as presented in real rallying. You may not be risking your life, but it feels real enough. Picture it for a minute. You’re on your final section of the final day of a rally weekend, when the clock shows you’re just behind the leader. You can see first place is only a few ‘just past the limit’ corners away, so you’re going to risk it and push very hard. On the other hand, sometimes you can see you have time to spare, so you don’t push too hard in case you screw up.

For those who enjoy the sweet taste of eye candy, you can rest assured you’re well catered for. The car gets mucky as it travels the stages, it backfires, has beautiful camera work for replays and the car damages as you trash it, but not to any crazy amount. The cars are curve rendered and look good, the tracks are a geometry miracle but with the usual low-res textures. None of that really matters of course, it’s far more important to learn that it moves at an undisturbed 60 frames per second (err, possibly 50 on these PAL televisions) and plays very, very fast. Especially if you like to ride with the bonnet camera or in-car camera. If you’re a McRae 3 fan, you’ll probably gripe the scenery is less interesting and varied. That is the true, but the graphics here are far more beautiful, have bigger stages and far more complex terrain to bump around on. It’s different to McRae 3 graphics – not better, not worse, just different.

If you played the first WRC game, try to forget it. This renders better, has a far better feel and is tough. By contrast the first game was far, far too easy to use over-steer at every corner to slow you down, then power out. You can’t do that here – it’s a much more rewarding drive. With WRCII you really can drive as fast as you want, but don’t expect to get around every bend unscathed; Unless you have the right speed, a good line and the right car balance you’ll blow it every time. Also, if you read the official forum occupiers at the time of release – ignore their petty discussion about the car wheels returning to ‘normal’ too quickly…the steering feels perfectly precise and responsive as one imagines a £250,000 rally car should. Of course each car is suitably different. No doubt you’ll actually find yourself lured by the small Pug, finally coming to admit the Subaru just can’t cut it, seven years after it’s debut. But we digress…

Multiplayer, time trial, quick race are available. But don’t worry about them, get into the WRC Challenge and try to beat the rest of Europe on the official championship…try to win the Ford Focus show car on offer. Trying to nail the tracks required demands incredible effort and you’ll soon see how many great drivers are out there.

WRCII has everything you have come to expect; quality sound, night stages, super specials, rain, snow, bonus cars etc. Input from the pad is well done and the game draws beautiful scenery many miles away, all the camera positions you could want are available and you can play in widescreen. When it comes to hardcore simulations, this game feels perfect and looks great. When you know a stage inside out, there’s no feeling cheated if you crash – you will know exactly why you crashed and you’ll be convinced you won’t do that again.

This is pure rallying and to begin with it is frustrating. Don’t stop after thirty minutes cursing though, spend five hours with this one and you’ll agree: this is a rally sim for purists.

While it’s a fantastic simulator, it is a little short of being a fantastic game. After the frustration lets up and you get into it you’ll be aware of three further flaws; First, night driving is poorly conceived and impossible to play – despite being a compulsory part of the championship. The second problem is collisions…hitting a barrier has an all-too-real effect of spinning your car to a halt – every time. That’s fine when you know a track inside out and back to front, because you’ll rarely hit the barriers, but you’ll never learn all these tracks – 800km of track is not going to commit to memory easily. A little more intelligence should have been applied. If you gently scrape a barrier at speed, gaming etiquette demands that you can get away with a minor penalty – but the penalty here is a haul down the gears, into reverse, stamp on the brakes, then off up the gears again. Oh yes, narrow tracks and accurate steering lock leaves no room for half a donut. Finally the third problem is arguably a problem for other rally games; the pace notes never get shouted perfectly. On each stage, on at least one occasion the pace note depicting corner type will be called when you’re in the corner, not before it. Most frustrating.

For the mechanics amongst you, you may be disappointed to learn that there’s no fiddling about with the oily bits (well, no more than you expect in a console sim – tyre, suspension settings etc). For the rest of us, that’s no big deal.

CONCLUSION

Stunning simulation, slightly flawed game. Still, for simulation fans, this is the cream of a very large crop of console and PC games. Quite how Sony let the studio get away with such a tough driving model is beyond me – but well done to Evolution Studios for pulling that one off. The level of detail in the road terrain is a massive boon to a rally game and the feeling of hill climbing is unsurpassed (and believe me, I’ve played dozens of rally games). Let’s hope next years inevitable update doesn’t move on down the arcade route. In fact, it doesn’t matter if they do, you’ll always have WRC II to return to for a thirty-minute blast down your favourite stage.

Four out of five cats all agree – they love Gran Turismo. You can’t beat hurtling round Seattle in a cobra with traction and stability turned off…and you can play for hour after hour. But in WRCII, when you’re concentrating so hard on the clock, co-driver pace notes, road shape, road incline, road camber, gear choice and car balance, you honestly cannot do that for more than an hour without fatigue setting in. If you do, or even when you cease to concentrate, the result is many crashes (you must have seen the rally driver’s tantrum when they blow it? You’ll go through that emotion here, a lot). But you’ll switch off the machine, take a deep breath and smile. You’ve just got as close to virtual rallying as you can for the time being.

SIM GRADE=3