I’m not gonna lie, rallying is a pretty slept-on discipline of motorsports. Unlike many series, where the car is the one doing the actual driving and the driver just tells it what to do, rallying is a sport where the person behind the wheel is the one doing all the hard work.

To put it simply, it’s a motorsport that involves throwing yourself down a narrow gravel road at ludicrous speeds whilst trying not wrap yourself around a Finnish conifer, whilst an incredibly brave man in the passenger seat shouts at you a mysterious language of numbers and letters they’ve written down in biro on a notepad they stole from Home Bargains. Safe to say, it’s a little bit mad.

EA Sports WRC is the first game in the long-running series of officially-licensed games by the World Rally Championship to come from Codemasters, longtime racing game experts most famous for the widely-beloved Colin McRae Rally series and the officially-licensed Formula One games, and is the first new IP to ship from the company since its acquisition by Electronic Arts back in 2020.

Graphically, EASWRC (As I shall now call it from this point on) is nothing to write home about. That’s not too surprising considering this is the first big-budget project from Codemasters since TOCA Race Driver 3 to not use their in-house EGO engine (At least for visuals, physics and sound design still seem to be handled by Codemasters’ own technology), instead attempting to harness the power of Unreal Engine 4 to produce a more visually pleasing experience than its ancient predecessor. Instead, what you get is a game that actually looks worse than DiRT Rally 2.0, especially if you’re playing on console or don’t have the horsepower to crank up the graphics to Ultra or Epic.