EA Sports: WRC 24

The store listing promises the official championship: real teams, real drivers, the full calendar, an EA Sports badge on the front. All of that is genuinely there, and the licence matters more here than it usually does, because in rally it is what buys you real stage rosters instead of invented gravel loops with legally distinct names. Where the pitch oversells itself is the number on the end of the title. A new digit implies a rebuild. This is not one. It is the same rally engine Codemasters has been sharpening since the Dirt Rally years, with the season refreshed around it and most of the rough edges still exactly where you left them. The driving is the reason to be here, and it is very good. Cars carry weight the way arcade racers never bother to simulate. You set the nose with a lift or a flick, you feel the diff bite when you get back on the throttle, and gravel behaves nothing like tarmac or snow. Loose surface stages reward commitment and punish hesitation. Tarmac punishes commitment and rewards precision. Rough, rocky events will humble you inside two kilometres. On a wheel with decent force feedback the detail coming through the rim is genuinely readable, telling you when the rear is going and when it has already gone. On a pad it is harder work but far from hopeless, and the assist sliders are granular enough that you can meet the game halfway instead of being shoved between easy and impossible. Structurally it is stage after stage after stage, and how much you enjoy that depends entirely on whether six minutes alone with a co-driver reading numbers at you sounds like heaven or homework. There is no pack to race against, no rubber-banding rival in your mirrors, just you, the notes, and a clock. Career mode wraps that in team management: hiring staff, choosing which repairs actually fit inside a limited service window, deciding whether to nurse a bent car home for points or push and risk the whole event. The car list spans the junior categories up through the current top-tier hybrids, plus historic machinery that handles like it actively wants you dead, and there are shorter formats for evenings when you have twenty minutes rather than three hours. What does not hold up is nearly everything around the driving. Presentation is thin, with menus that feel like spreadsheets in a hurry and a season structure that communicates almost nothing dramatic about a title fight. PC performance has been this series' sore spot for a while now, so go in with your settings conservative and your expectations for perfectly smooth frame pacing lowered. The opposition is functionally a set of times on a leaderboard, which is honest to how the sport actually works but does mean there is very little theatre to any of it. And the annual cadence shows badly. If you put serious hours into the previous entry, a lot of this will read as a content refresh wearing a new number rather than a reason to start over. So, who should actually pick this up. If you want real stages, a handling model that respects you, and you have a wheel gathering dust in a cupboard, this is comfortably the best home for that on PC, and the driving alone earns the time you put in. If you are coming from circuit racing and want wheel-to-wheel scrapping, you will bounce off it inside a weekend, because solitude is the entire point. If you already own the last one and only run a few events a month, there is no urgency here at all. Everyone else: sort out your pedals, learn to actually trust the pacenotes instead of your eyes, and give it a full season before you judge it. The moment the notes start living in your head a beat ahead of the corner is the moment this clicks, and nothing else in the genre delivers that feeling as reliably.

Alex · Scout Team

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