In light of the layoffs to Codemasters staff that EA announced today, I can no longer recommend this game. I've avoided all EA titles for years for exactly this sort of thing. I finally break down and then they go and do this.

Think about it: EA pressed Codemasters staff to ship WRC in time for the holiday rush. Then they don't even keep those same employees on through the holidays. Disgraceful.

In the off chance you're unaware of what has happened, WRC, previously published by Nacon (Big Ben Interactive re-brand) and developed by KT Racing and Srl Milestone lost the WRC license to Codemasters, whom does the DiRT/DiRT Rally games. Codemasters was purchased by EA for a cool $1.2 billion.

They are not connected in any other way. So, in effect, this is DiRT Rally 3, but officially licensed.

That said, there isn't a ton to say regarding the game as a whole. It has a decent career mode with crew management and benefactor appeasement which will affect your available budget both positively and negatively. The physics are drastically improved, wholesale. The older WRC titles felt floaty, and as though your tires were covered in soap. DiRT Rally 2 had a number of issues where a lot of the surfaces didn't actually feel much different, that isn't the case here.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3090942057

The one issue I have with this game is that EA decided to not include Dailies, Weeklies or Monthlies. Arguably one of the most popular features in DiRT Rally 2. Instead featuring “Moments” — either based on real historical rally races, inspired by, or literal historic races. Some of these moments will have secondary an tertiary objectives to fulfill. And these will run for about 6 weeks (at least at the time of writing this) with a leaderboard. Some are locked behind an EA Play subscription.

I found that the Quick Generate Championship option under quickplay to be a decent supplement for my desire for new dailies/weeklies. It will randomly select a location, stages, a class of car and this, in effect, can satisfy your desire to simply “jump in”.

There will be 'seasons' of content planned, I used to be very against this sort of thing. But it's just a reality of, not only the game industry, but where we are as an entertainment medium. Games cost a lot of money to develop and it seems like people just have less time — in general. The only way companies can keep costs relatively low and approachable for the average consumer is to elongate the “window” where people are playing — which is subsequently why we see the rise of Free to Play models. Very few people would be willing to pay $100 or $120 for a new game. But $60 and then $30 in 2 months for a big expansion, and another $30 for a some random cosmetics a few months after that, that's seems to be fine for the average person. And that's been the paradigm shift.

This package feels a bit bare bones right now, but it'll get more added to it over time. I know many don't like EA. However, there are numerous companies that do much worse than them and it really feels like it's just popular to hate on EA without any real reason.

The tracks are great, the physics are great. If you feel apprehensive or don't trust EA, just wait.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3071916474

If you've found this review helpful, consider following my curation — Station Argus

WRC9 review here.
DiRT Rally 2 review here.

I did play WRC10, but it was the Switch version.

Long time sim racer/rallyist - played RBR since release, DR2.0 but wasn't keen on floaty car feeling, and Klyoton WRC games - all on a Thrustmaster TX wheel, Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RTX 2080Ti, 32GB RAM.

This game gets a lot of hate because it's EA - let's take EA out of it and be honest:

Some people get performance issues - previously I did, I've had none since the last patch thankfully. But the stuttering I had was 0.5 seconds for each first run of the stage (shader compilation in Unreal engine being the culprit) as I said since last patch I don't get any.

[EDIT 20/01/24] - The stuttering returned post-patch on the first run of each stage again during the first hour of play - after the first hour it was all good again. Slightly annoying, but at least it didn't stay! It's as if patching cleared the shader patch.

Car handling on gravel and snow is great, very enjoyable and FUN to drive. Tarmac is way better than Dirt Rally 2.0, but it's very twitchy. Is it realistic? I have no idea, I've never driven a rally car IRL (much like 99% of people here I guess..), but it's believable and as I said fun to drive. Certainly miles above DR2.0 when it comes to handling.

On cars - there's so many different classes and so many different cars to choose from. Outside of RBR mods this is the best rally car selection in any game.

The car builder is a nice addition - I didn't think I'd use it, but I've made 5 cars in it now with different layouts in different classes. It's a fun addition! My main issue with it is the cars you end up making all look like they come from between 2004-2014. They don't look like modern cars at all!

Stage design is good - and it should be they're apparently based on real roads! But for me it lacks the fine detail of the Klyoton WRC stages which made them really good. For example - the atmosphere is pretty flat. Spectators don't look at your car as it goes past - they're all staring into the middle distance as if they have something on their minds.

The stage degradation feature doesn't seem to do much. I was excited when hearing about this, but the stages feel the same, ruts don't seem to get deeper.

Career mode is broken. Don't play this right now. Currently if I resume my career in the middle of a rally the AI difficulty breaks and I end up 2-3 minutes per stage faster than them. This isn't the case if I do the full rally in 1 go. The benefactor and mix of calendar events feels like a carry over from the last WRC game - I wonder if this is a requirement from WRC rather than codemasters choosing to put it in?

[EDIT 20/01/24] - Since 1.4.1 patch it is better. You can resume mid-rally and most of the time it works. But my first resume mid-rally I had 1 stage with cars the right speed, 1 stage with the cars the wrong speed (I was 4 min faster), after that they were all fine again...

Clubs and time trials are where the fun is - join some clubs and compete against other real life people. It's so much fun to try and hit that perfect stage to see how high up the leaderboards you get. Better still, create a club for you and your friends and you can constantly try and beat them! Time trials as well - I ended up with a couple of WRs trying to beat a friend's time on one stage. We spent a week trading times and pushed ourselves to the top!

Finally the overall look of the game - Unreal engine was a strange choice, but the "Codemasters brown filter" still exists where it looks like you're seeing through a layer of brown all the time. Particle effects look great though, close up everything looks good, but the traditional unreal blurriness at distance is still a problem.

Overall I do recommend this game, but I guess the good and bad looks like this...
Good:
- Cars are believable with how they drive but very fun to drive
- Huge variety of cars
- Stage design is good
- Clubs and Time Trials are great fun
- Great looking effects (dust trails etc)
- Car builder is reasonably in depth and is a nice addition

Bad:
- Stage degradation doesn't seem to do much
- Stages lack atmosphere, Spectators never look at your car
- Tarmac handling is way too twitchy around the centre of the wheel rotation
- Performance issues (resolved for me)
- It looks like you're seeing through a layer of brown all the time
- VR not here yet

[Edit 13/02/24]
Indifferent
- Career mode (previously bad) works now, I just wish it had a bit more depth to it!
[/edit]

So yes, I recommend this game, it's not perfect. But it's the best modern rally game we have right now if you just want to drive rally cars. (RBR+mods does not count as modern...). If career mode is your thing, wait until it's fixed before buying.

[Edit 13/02/24]
To address some comments:
- Stutter is hit and miss for most people, for me it's fine again (since shader cache rebuilt), but if I had constant stutter like a lot of people then I wouldn't be recommending this game.
- Professional yapper...? Just trying to be open and clear based on how I feel the game is...
- Agree it feels great on a controller too, I have tried a few stages on my Xbox pad and it felt surprisingly good!
- I run a TX because I can't afford to upgrade yet - but I fail to see the point?
- List of cons with recommendation - it's based on the driving experience, stage variety and car selection, which I find to be very good, believable and fun.
- Manual shifting for me is fine (using sequential shifter + auto clutch)

Normally i would just let a positive review for this game, cause i find it fun and i quite enjoy it. But then i went to see the "Moments" section to explore, and some moments require EA Membership. Ok its only 3 moments for now if i counted right. But why do i need to have an active subscription to play a part of the game that i prepurchased

I spend a lot of time sim racing. I can tell you first hand that nearly every sim out there is a self maintained play set where you have to make your own fun. This game is actually a finished product that you can open, play, and have fun in without hassle. This game is a direct improvement over Dirt Rally 2 in every way. The stages are infinitely more realistic, the handling is better, and the career mode actually attempts to simulate a career instead of just being a series of events that scale to whatever car you're driving. You will see people in these reviews comparing this game to Richard Burns Rally (RBR), telling you to save your money and play that instead. It's the ((true sim experience)) after all. The true sim experience means spending 2 hours setting up a 10-20 year old game to work with fan mods so you can run time trials over and over again on a program that feels like its barely functioning because it has marginally more realistic physics. I've done it and it's fun, but frankly rally isn't my main choice of motor sport, and I don't want to have to reconfigure wheel and game settings every time I want to do it. Neither does anyone who's new to this hobby, and anyone who hasn't already gotten past the several hundred dollar barrier to entry for a sim setup is going to be scared off by it. This is a sim that is also a video game. It has progression, challenges, pretty good tutorials, and engaging game play. To be completely honest I'm not particularly swayed by these claims that the game isn't realistic, because none of these people have ever driven these cars and this is much more in line with how I would expect them to perform. There's also videos of real rally drivers driving their cars in this game and saying the grip felt correct. Surely sim racers wouldn't argue with actual race car drivers about the characteristics of their cars. That's definitely never happened before right? That would just be absurd now wouldn't it. Now, talking about what the actual game is like, I'll start with the stages.

I played a decent amount of Dirt Rally 2 (never got the chance to play previous WRC games), and pretty much immediately I realized that they would be the biggest selling point of this game. In the Dirt Rally games (which I will refer to as DR1 and DR2 from now on) the stages were a mish mash of existing real world locations with more exaggerated features, and the roads were also pretty wide. In this game, the locations are closer to their real world counter parts than you will get with pretty much any other game, and the roadways are also mostly 1 car wide, just like the real thing. The lengths of the tracks also match their real world counter parts, although you can select an option to run shorter versions of them if you don't want to spend 20 minutes on a stage. They're fast, they're technical, and they're exhilarating. I've seen some say that they are boring, but I disagree. I think if you could go fast on fictional tracks that were more technically intense due to being shorter, and you play a recreation of a real track and find it easy, you're probably just a better driver than you realize. I think it's a very common occurrence within the sim racing community to mistake difficulty for realism. Racing is hard, but making it harder doesn't automatically make it more realistic.

Playing DR1 and 2 I rarely ever felt like my car was gripping the surface below me. It felt like I was constantly in a state of 100% wheelspin gliding over the track and guiding my car in the direction I wanted it to go in. This was especially bad on tarmac, it felt like driving over smooth ice. In this game the cars feel like they are really biting into the surface underneath, and its an absolute dream to play. Tarmac is downright addictive in this game, and hitting a well executed handbrake turn never gets old. Paired with the longer, more realistic stages this is the most intensely enjoyable rally experience I've ever had. Everything works out of the box and feels great. RBR had a better damage model and feels marginally more "realistic" I guess but the amount of effort it takes to keep it maintained and running isn't worth it to me for the amount of content it actually offers. In terms of wheel feel it's not as good as assetto corsa (nothing ever is), but it does the job and gets the message across well enough. Can't speak to controller as I haven't tried it yet. The actual physics model its self is very satisfying.

If you've played either of the DR games you'll know that the careers are pretty bare bones. You'd buy a car, race it, earn money, upgrade or buy a new car, repeat infinitely. It worked but it got old quick. This game has a career mode much more akin to the F1 games (which I admittedly have not spent much time playing). When you start a career you can choose between Junior WRC, WRC2, and WRC. From there you sign with a benefactor that gives you a weekly budget for things like cars, engineers, and repairs. From there you complete tasks that raise your benefactors happiness level, which gives you higher budgets and lets you advance between the different levels of WRC. It's a great system that allows players at any skill level to get the experience they want while also getting rid of any kind of currency grind. There's no conventional money system so if you pick a car you don't like, you can just change it and the money comes out of the weekly budget. It's a great system, and I can easily see how it would be further fleshed out in future updates and future games. It can also be completely ignored if you wish. There's nothing pushing you towards it if you just want to do custom championships and time attacks.

I'd also like to take a short moment to comment on the menus. In my sim racing career I have come to despise them. I put a lot of value in a game that I can open and be in a race within 5 minutes. It's a big reason why I always kind of preferred DR1 to DR2. DR2 had a lot of menu diving and load times, and none of the information was ever conveyed that clearly. I'm happy to say that this game is as good as it gets in this aspect. Within 5 button presses you can be in an event, which makes this game great for long career sessions as well as pick up and play. A highly underrated aspect of game design at the moment in my opinion.

There's more I didn't touch on because I haven't really played with it yet. I haven't even opened the builder mode that allows you to create your own unique vehicles but it sounds neat. The moments mode sounds cool too, and I haven't looked at the online at all yet. There's a lot to do.

In conclusion, if you want to play a sim that is also a video game, this is a good buy. It's 50 dollars (30 less than the new average retail price for a game), has a good amount of content, a great career mode, handles beautifully, and is an all round good time. This game is a step in the right direction for the genre, and I hope we see more games as good as this within the near future. It's been very dry for a very long time. I know within a year or two the sim crowd will come around to this for what it is. They're very stubborn and this being published by EA dictated a lot of peoples opinions before it ever even came out.

(P.S. I've seen the complaints about performance issues. On an RTX 3060ti and Ryzen 7 5700 with default settings the games never dropped below 60 for me. Hopefully whatever issues are there get patched out but I haven't been experiencing them.)

Overall the game is actually really good but there are still severe optimization issues that cause really bad stutters. In a game this fast paced these stutters can really throw you off when coming into a corner at 140 mph. They came out with an update that was supposed to fix it but did not. There is a lack of graphic settings to fix this or help band aid the issue as well.

I have 825 hours in Dirt Rally 2.0. And it was mostly driving. But WRC knocks it out of the park. Stages are incredible, clearly better than WRC Generations. Amount of cars never seen before, the Physics especially of the Historic RWD cars is sublime. Enough content here to keep you busy over 1k hours if you want to be a rally god!.
Only thing need doing is some more patching as its not without the odd crash on particular stages, and a few graphical glitches, and VR needs adding for the VR crowd (i miss you guys too), then we are set.
10/10.

Overall really solid. but the performance issues need to be adressed ASAP

where's the VR support? they said after launch but i wasn't imagining it's gonna take 3 years to deliver it....
I guess going back to a Dirt 2.0 is the only solution, thanks EA, you really know how to ruin everything you touch :)

10 reasons not to buy this(or any) EA game

1. Runs like garbage. Crashing, stutters, low FPS, pop-in, you name it. It's here and frequent

2. Looks like garbage on my liquid cooled 4090. Way worse than DR2.0. The sun washes everything out into looking like it just snowed...in the desert

3. Super buggy. Saved tuning settings being set to zero, UI glitches, crashes, you name it. You haven't been able to play career mode since the last patch because it's a guaranteed crash. That's how bad this game is.

4. Falsely advertised features like triple screen adjustments and VR are not in the game, I don't expect they ever will be

5.Physics are ok on some cars with a bit of tuning. But most cars don't drive properly, and forget about tarmac(which is a large portion of the game) unless you like snap oversteering in very unrealistic ways over and over

6. Absolutely stupid monetization, I find it hard to believe anyone would actually pay for a season pass to get outfits you'll never see on your driver. Speaking of, my driver is a CROSS EYED Rob Dyrdek clone.

7. The corny voice overs make me groan so loud my partner asks if everything is ok

8. The AI is broken, they've known since launch, they won't fix it

9. EA fired parts of the team even though they know the game is broken, unfinished, and it's their fault for rushing them in the first place

10. Career mode sucks. I'm not trying to play Mechanic Manager Simulator I'm trying to do rally racing

11. The co-driver calls are WAY too late.

In summary this is everything you expect from an EA title: It has missing features they lied about, it's buggy, it runs awful, it has predatory monetization, the gameplay is unpolished, it's unfinished.

Yeah, we didn't get an arcade racing game like most of us feared - but we barely got a playable game at all

*Disclaimer: they claimed to have fixed a lot of the issues I mentioned here in their patches- but they didn't fix any of it