This means Poland has been flicked, but Turkey and Chile have been added and those stages are all-new. The full 2019 season is replicated inside WRC 8 – the complete 14-country calendar and all the cars and teams from WRC Junior, WRC 2, and WRC. Subtle stuff like the muted noise of crowds cheering big jumps – audible even over the wail of the needle bouncing off the limiter – didn’t go unnoticed, either. Sound is pretty top notch this edition, to be honest, with a great mix of a barking and burbling exhausts, tons of a kick-up, and plenty of meaty collision noises. The water-splash effects have had a boost as well, and they’re accompanied by a deafening blast as puddles pummel the undercarriage. The suitably streaky effect that accompanies flicking the wipers on for the first time is nice, too (with dynamic weather, those of us who race in cabin view need to manually toggle the wipers any time it begins to rain, or if the windscreen has simply accumulated too much muck to see out of). Beading water, which was surprisingly sub-par in WRC 7, has been replaced with a much more modern and authentic rain effect in WRC 8. Low sun pierces through the treelines and a spectrum of time-of-day conditions are on offer to really change up the aesthetics of stages run under different cloud and weather scenarios. Watch the KT Racing team discuss WRC 8's stage design in the video below.Ī handsome looking racer, WRC 8’s lighting effects are particularly strong this year. There’s a little bit of arbitrary game-y nonsense when it comes to managing bonus objectives (it’s illogical your reputation with your current manufacturer would take a hit simply for using a particular tyre compound during a rally if you’d also just won the rally) but overall it’s still a huge improvement from the entirely vanilla career experience of WRC 7.

Whether you choose to apply upgrade points to improving your cash and XP awards or you opt to target strictly technical improvements is up to you.

There’s also now a large skill and tech tree, shamelessly reminiscent of the R&D system that’s been part of the F1 games for several years now, and it adds a bunch of extra layers to WRC 8’s racing career. That said, I think the crew management is still a good addition to WRC 8, injecting a welcome team atmosphere into what had previously been a pretty lonely experience. It’s also more than a little incongruous that it’d be up to the driver to personally manage staff vacation time in the first place. For instance, while my co-driver and I spent several days slicing through Swedish tundra at speeds that would make even the sternest scrotum shrivel, my agent got so burnt out from sipping champagne and eating tiny triangle sandwiches in the hospitality tent that he needed a week off. Granted, it’s a little daft how quickly staff tend to tire considering they’re not the ones doing to the actual driving. Skilled mechanics can accomplish more repairs within the limited window at the service park between stages effective agents can wrangle invites to more exclusive one-off events and canny meteorologists can forecast further into the future, giving you an idea about potential weather changes deeper into stages. “Specific staff now need to be hired to fill six important roles, each of whom come with gameplay benefits attached to make those decisions feel meaningful.

Wrc 8 gamestop