[leonidas]

Ill health and time at home persuaded me to get hold of the latest official WRC game - and, very surprisingly, it really is rather good! Anyone else enjoying this?

The car handling is very convincing and far ahead of Dirt 4 - it perhaps the best since Richard Burns? You can induce oversteer to power through corners but carelessness is rewarded by a trip into the scenery. Handbrakes have to be used carefully or you can overdo it. The R5s are particularly impressive and perhaps the most difficult to master. The new generation WRC cars may have brakes that are a little too powerful although it must be said the cars move around convincingly and bite if pushed too hard.

The stages capture the 14 rallies really well, with some stages upto 18km long. El Chocolate is awesome. The career mode is fairly rubbish but you can build custom rallies upto 9 stages long and lasting over one hour in overall driving time. That does mean repeating stages but that what the WRC does too... You can also do hot seat and split scene rallying which makes it a good social game.