WRC 8 Review for Nintendo Switch

To the uninitiated, the rally racing game WRC 8: World Rally Championship is sure to be intimidating at first. I certainly had my doubts about the game. But, as I played more and more, I found myself really enjoying the game, even though I typically wouldn’t have picked it up on my own. I think it’s important to experiment with genres outside of your bubble, and I would personally recommend this game for anyone who has played other cartoon kart racing games and wants to experience something a bit more realistic.

I personally started off WRC 8 with some expectations in my mind about how driving a car in a videogame should handle, so I’d like to clear that up before going into anything else. WRC 8 tries really hard to have realistic physics, which includes drifting, cutting, and other techniques that come with handling a real car and not just some dinky tight kart devised to exist in a videogame vacuum. At first, I disliked this – I disliked the handling of my car since it was so hard to maneuver around corners and the likes – but once I got used to the control scheme of lightly tapping brakes to drift, I felt myself really getting the hang of it. There were certain points where I would nail the drift into a square right turn and make off with most of my speed and those were the most satisfying “I get it!” moments for me. They were rare, but they made up for all the other bumping and crashing I went through.

WRC 8 has a rigorous campaign mode which is supposed to represent running a real team and racing in scheduled tournaments, but what killed it for me was that it is very unforgiving. I can do okay in a given race, but because my car ended up so badly damaged, I still didn’t really earn any money. It was really hard to keep good standing with my crew and my sponsor, so I imagine it would take much longer to get to a skill level where these things would actually come into play. If the campaign mode is too tough for you, though, you can always run a training course or even try out one of the weekly challenge courses, where you can practice on real maps without being penalized in the campaign. 

The only downsides to WRC 8 for me would be that the learning curve is very steep and the gameplay gets repetitive. As I said earlier, coming from a background that isn’t in this genre of games, it was hard for me to feel like the campaign was really relevant at my skill level. Also, the races themselves were really just a sequence of turns through very similar looking track. Of course each track was different, but some tracks took more than 5 minutes to beat. Staying on top of your game for that long is pretty hard, especially when there’s no immediate feedback to measure how well I’m doing. One thing I wished I had was an indicator of how well I was placing against the other drivers. Since the races are all done with a single driver on the track at once, there was very little competitive action. I would just see the leaderboard at the end of a tough fought track, which doesn’t give the same active drive.

I ended up liking WRC 8 much more than I thought I would, but at least for a layman, it definitely has its flaws. I wish I could have experienced more of the campaign without my car being destroyed every race, and that the game overall was more competitive, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy just following the turns of a track. WRC 8 is satisfying to play correctly, but unfortunately, it’s hard to get to that level. For those up to the challenge, though, I would recommend checking this game out.

7.5/10

Here is the WRC 8 Trailer:

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David Morales

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I am an aspiring game designer looking to explore the philosophy behind game creation. Some of my favorite games include Overwatch, Super Smash Bros, Portal, and Beat Saber.

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