WRC 8 FIA World Rally Championship

In Career mode, you start off with the Junior WRC cars and work your way up through to WRC1. The seasons become longer as you go through the classes. 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.

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

The rally events are marked on your calendar, with the blank weeks allowing you to select an event. There will be a selection of events available but there's not many game types. There's the simple circuit "Training" event. "Historic Race" where you race in a retro car, "Manufacturer Tryout" for the chance of switching who you race for, and "Extreme condition" event which is often takes place in a very dark and rainy night, on thin twisty roads with a heavily damaged car and your aim is to travel a certain distance with it. Since most race types weren't interesting, I found I was just choosing the "Extreme Condition" events, but then they got old fast.

There’s no rewind, unlike in the older WRC 4, so instead your car resets with a 9 second penalty. If you go off course, and attempt to drive back, the penalty seems to appropriately scale down. So taking 5 seconds then resetting will just add around 4 seconds as a penalty. There were a few places where it seemed a bit eager to reset your car even though I thought I could easily recover.

Your car seemed to be gradually damaged just by driving. So if you don't crash, you can still have 30% damage to some components (engine, steering, suspension) as shown when you have the chance to repair. Some parts can be fixed in percentage increments, whereas some parts have to be swapped outright. When you don't have a skilled mechanic, some individual parts take longer to replace than the total allotted time.

I didn't like the staff mechanic or the skill tree. It seems like the game is designed with the mindset that everything is maxed out, and so when they aren't then it seems you are hindered. The Financial Director staff member is vital since they can increase earnings by 50% and lower costs by 50%. You get hit with so many costs and when you don't have this staff member available, you get totally screwed over. Here was my situation when finishing 1st in a rally:
36,000 prize money for finishing 1st
28,500 entry fee
19,906 repair cost and I barely damaged my car
So -12,406 reward for winning a rally. What's all that about?
Then I paid around 4k to the staff that I did have.
Then there's your car "condition" as well, so then I had to pay 19k to participate in the Maintenance Event.
So a loss of -35,406 for that week.

To see the weather, you need a Meteorologist, and also need upgrades on the skill tree to see the full weather throughout the full event. What's wrong with just googling the weather?

Your staff get tired and if the stamina bar depletes, they are then returned to the reserve pool. If they are there, they can leave. If you have paid a hiring fee to acquire them, then this is another way you can get screwed over.

There's also some "perk" cards to assign to gain certain bonuses. I wasn't convinced that these work. There was one that was supposed to negate your first race penalty but I never witnessed this working.

I also didn't like the objectives. Sometimes it was like "Perform 3 Training events in 3 weeks", or "do not use soft tyres". I felt this tyre one wasn't really an objective; it's more like a challenge.

The actual racing is fine, but the mechanics of the career mode didn't really work for me. The handling felt good but then it has the problem of some really janky crash physics where you can end up rolling way too much, or can easily flip your car back onto its wheels when you are upside-down.