WRC II Extreme

It’s surprising to me that such a great rally game never got ported over to North American regions, considering the first WRC game made it over here just fine. I mean, this is already playable in English! Not only that, but this is a huge improvement over the 2001 WRC game that came before. The graphics, physics, track design, and environments all get massive updates, turning this into an impressively good looking game by 2002 standards.

Compared to other rally games at the time, the traction in this game is considerably more sticky, and it takes some getting used to. Especially when dealing with snow or rain, having to constantly adjust to how your car slides around is a bit annoying at first, though it becomes a welcome challenge the more you play. Generally, the damage is not unforgiving, so I can often continue through stages even after I slam head first into a pole. On the flipside, bumping into a wall will often pin your car’s nose up against it, which causes you to lose a lot of time reversing off of it.

At the time of writing, I haven’t played at expert level yet, though the professional difficulty is fair enough once you get used to the car’s handling. As long as you don’t have any major crashes, getting first place position is not a big challenge. On the amateur difficulty, you don’t have to worry much about damage, either. The stages are shorter, and getting a first place position is easy to the point where you’ll often end up leading by over 20 seconds. The interesting part of the professional difficulty, however, is doing these HUGE 14+ kilometer stages that you wouldn’t expect to see coming from an early PS2 game.

The choice of cameras is nice, as well. I normally stick with my hood-cam, though WRC II features a nice interior cam, as well as a third-person cam that’s actually usable (unlike the first WRC game). As far as rally games go, I have no complaints with this one. Don’t expect this to be as easy to get into as Dirt. Put enough time into it, and once you get into the game’s groove, it becomes a lot of fun.