500 left over crest, right hairpin, caution....

Let me start by telling you that WRC - World Rally Championship - is a great game. It's an officially licensed WRC product so it has all the cars, drivers, tracks and advertising you'd expect to see from the 2001 championship seasons. This already makes it a class ahead of the abysmal GTC Africa (see another of my reviews). WRC is a championship series of off-road and on-road races that take place around the world every year, centred in Europe. The vehicles are highly modified actual showroom sedan cars, as oppose to Nascar where all the cars are the same tubular-framed affairs but have fibreglass bodies designed to make them look like showroom cars. WRC cars have tuned engines, tyres, suspension and lights, and are kitted out with internal rollcages designed to take maximum abuse from the drivers.

The graphics in WRC are first class. They're not as good as Gran Turismo (my benchmark) but they are more than adequate. The cars are well modelled although they look a little tall by my reckoning. Unlike GTC Africa, these cars get damaged and get dirty, and you can see the little burst of flame from the exhaust when downshifting. I stuffed my WRC Subaru into a lamp post in the second stage of the Monte Carlo rally and it blew out all the windows, smashed up the bodywork and ruined the engine and gearbox. On continuing the stage, I was stuck in third gear, with steam and smoke coming out of the hood and the car pulled noticeably to the left. This is sort of what you'd expect, but it's nice to see the game programmers have included this sort of detail. Another nice little touch is the indicator - often in WRC you'll see a car that's been rolled or abused, carrying on with the stage all bent out of shape but with an indicator going. This happens in WRC the game too. Also, in WRC, you can roll the cars and flip them. It's a shame the crowd don't run out and try to right the cars like they do in the real world, but that might have been asking too much. One point to note : in WRC, there's only one car on the track at once, both in the real world, and in the game. So don't expect to be racing against someone else - you're racing against the clock, with rank and position determined by overall time at the end of each stage and rally.

The tracks are great. There's a lot of detail in the immediate vicinity of the track, falling off to flat billboards in the distance (ie. the mountains aren't actually there in 3D, but are textured onto large 2D polygons in the distance). Crowds of specatators stand by the trackside egging you on. Road signs whip past in the blink of an eye. Dust clouds follow your car on the dry, dusty stages.

There's plenty of camera views in the game too. The traditional above-and-behind is present, along with on-roof, in-car, from-driver, and from-bumper cams. The two in-car views are great. You see the car interior and driver and co-driver all in 3D. The driver fights the steering wheel and whips his hand out to change gears, whilst the co-driver is bounced around in his harness.

After each stage, you get the chance to view and/or save your replay. The replay adds more cameras to the fray, including helicopter cameras, TV cams, from-front and from-rear cams, and in-car cams that face the drivers. In these last two you can see the texture-mapped faces of the drivers, and if you follow WRC in real life, you'll recognise the drivers, right down to Burns' rosy cheeks and nose.

The sound is good in WRC too. There's unique sounds for each of the cars, both inside and out. Crowds clap and cheer, helicopters buzz convincingly overhead. The crunch of the gearchange is great, as is the constant racket of pebbles and rocks smashing against the underside of the chassis. What is peculiarly well done is the co-driver's directions. In real life WRC, the co-driver is just as important as the driver. The tracks are so narrow that you don't have time to look at a map, and often the courses are raced with only a few days for familiarisation. So when the co-driver first tells you "200 left opening to long right, 500 right, hairpin left" you'll be left wondering "what the ...?" but after a couple of minutes of racing, you'll start to subconciously understand his commands and realise that you can 100% rely on him to tell you precisely what is around that next bend. In fact, the co-driver is so good, you can race most tracks 'blind' (ie. without ever racing them before) and come reasonably well placed first time around.

Controls are simple but effective. Oddly, the default steering control uses the d-pad instead of the left analogue stick. But the settings allow you to change that. Also in the settings you can change whether the buttons are to behave digitally, or in analogue mode. I found the digital mode better. In analogue, I could never quite seem to get enough pressure on the 'x' button to get full-speed or full acceleration.

Before each race you're allowed to choose a few customisable options, including gear settings (tall, medium, short), suspension settings, steering sensitivity and such. The default ones suggested by the game seem to work well for most stages. But this is where the one big downside of the game appears - loading times. After making all your selections, it takes 50 seconds to load the stage and be ready to race. In the end, this is forgivable because the game is good, but my initial reaction was "Oh no - this is bad." Before each stage, you're given a preview of the circuit with a spoken introduction by one of the WRC commentators (I think this one is Tiff Needell), and then it's ready to go.