WRC 7 FIA World Rally Championship

In Career mode, you start off with the Junior WRC cars and work your way up though to WRC1. The seasons become longer as you go through the classes. A season may consist of many rallies, and each rally consists of several races, grouped together in batches with a chance to repair your car and tweak after each batch. The races are mainly standard rally, so it's a race against time on a point-to-point track. The only exception are ones that are mainly road circuits where you often do 2 laps. Your times across the tracks are added together to calculate your overall finish in that rally.

As you win and complete objectives, you gain reputation which allows you to sign with higher prestigious teams. You cannot upgrade your car, or team skills like in some racing games. Your performance changes your team's morale, which apparently affects how efficiently they repair. I didn’t make a note of the effect though.

The teams have a preferred racing style, basically balanced, safe, aggressive, where the aggressive option gives you a 5% boost to speed, but you will incur more damage. Again, this is negligible.

There are 13 countries with various stages within which can take place in various times of day. There's plenty of surfaces to race on across the countries, so you will travel on road, gravel, mud and snow.

In WRC1, the rally is across all of the countries which takes a long time to complete. Your progress is saved after each race, so you can do it over many sessions; but it is still a gruelling task.

The damage was pretty forgiving, or at least on the settings I had. You had to really damage your car to notice an effect on the steering. I tended to notice drops in speed more than the control. When tyres are worn, it seems a common occurrence for them to pop, and that has the biggest impact.

There’s no rewind, unlike in the older WRC 4, so instead your car resets with a 9 second penalty. If you hit a pedestrian, you also get a 9 second penalty. Manually resetting gives you a 7 second penalty. There were a few places where it seemed a bit eager to reset your car even though I thought I could easily recover.

Another minor annoyance is that when you get the opportunity to repair your vehicle, “Start Race” is selected by default which means you can end up skipping the chance if you aren't careful. It seems strange not to take you to the repair screen by default.

I thought there were a couple of places where the callouts weren’t quite right. “Right 5, BRAKE!”. It’s not really a “Right 5” then is it? More of a “Right 2”. Aside from that confusing call, the pace-notes were fine.

In many racing games, I like trying each of the tracks sequentially in Quick Race. After one race, I then get annoyed that I have to scroll through each of the tracks to find the next one, then scroll through all of the cars to select the same car. A massive shoutout to this game though, because it remembers your track and car selection; even when you relaunch the game!

The graphics do look good, although my PC seemed to run very hot when on maximum settings. Lowering some of the settings seemed to lower the temperature, and I barely noticed any change to the graphics.

WRC 7 is a good rally game but I don’t think it is doing anything particularly interesting.