MiraiRacing
2023
I’m not gonna lie, rallying is a pretty slept-on discipline of motorsports. Unlike many series, where the car is the one doing the actual driving and the driver just tells it what to do, rallying is a sport where the person behind the wheel is the one doing all the hard work.
To put it simply, it’s a motorsport that involves throwing yourself down a narrow gravel road at ludicrous speeds whilst trying not wrap yourself around a Finnish conifer, whilst an incredibly brave man in the passenger seat shouts at you a mysterious language of numbers and letters they’ve written down in biro on a notepad they stole from Home Bargains. Safe to say, it’s a little bit mad.
EA Sports WRC is the first game in the long-running series of officially-licensed games by the World Rally Championship to come from Codemasters, longtime racing game experts most famous for the widely-beloved Colin McRae Rally series and the officially-licensed Formula One games, and is the first new IP to ship from the company since its acquisition by Electronic Arts back in 2020.
Graphically, EASWRC (As I shall now call it from this point on) is nothing to write home about. That’s not too surprising considering this is the first big-budget project from Codemasters since TOCA Race Driver 3 to not use their in-house EGO engine (At least for visuals, physics and sound design still seem to be handled by Codemasters’ own technology), instead attempting to harness the power of Unreal Engine 4 to produce a more visually pleasing experience than its ancient predecessor. Instead, what you get is a game that actually looks worse than DiRT Rally 2.0, especially if you’re playing on console or don’t have the horsepower to crank up the graphics to Ultra or Epic.
To put it simply, it’s a motorsport that involves throwing yourself down a narrow gravel road at ludicrous speeds whilst trying not wrap yourself around a Finnish conifer, whilst an incredibly brave man in the passenger seat shouts at you a mysterious language of numbers and letters they’ve written down in biro on a notepad they stole from Home Bargains. Safe to say, it’s a little bit mad.
EA Sports WRC is the first game in the long-running series of officially-licensed games by the World Rally Championship to come from Codemasters, longtime racing game experts most famous for the widely-beloved Colin McRae Rally series and the officially-licensed Formula One games, and is the first new IP to ship from the company since its acquisition by Electronic Arts back in 2020.
Graphically, EASWRC (As I shall now call it from this point on) is nothing to write home about. That’s not too surprising considering this is the first big-budget project from Codemasters since TOCA Race Driver 3 to not use their in-house EGO engine (At least for visuals, physics and sound design still seem to be handled by Codemasters’ own technology), instead attempting to harness the power of Unreal Engine 4 to produce a more visually pleasing experience than its ancient predecessor. Instead, what you get is a game that actually looks worse than DiRT Rally 2.0, especially if you’re playing on console or don’t have the horsepower to crank up the graphics to Ultra or Epic.
2022
So, I’m not gonna lie, seeing the two letters “E” and “A” listed in the credits of this game had me worried. In fact, that’s an understatement: I was positively bricking it. Was EA about to kill one of my favourite racing game series of all time with yet another cashgrab pile of greedy filth? Thankfully, no.
GRID Legends feels almost like an apology for the terminally dull series reboot back in 2019, a game that was so devoid of personality it felt like playing through a game that was made whilst watching a tutorial about how to build a functional racing game: You buy cars, you race them, you win said races, you buy more cars with the money you just won, cycle repeats. By the time I got to the final faceoff against Ravenwest I was functioning entirely on autopilot.
GRID Legends fixes that by bringing back some fan-favourite game modes such as Elimination and Multiclass Racing, touching up the visuals to make the game more colourful, adjusting the progression to make things less of a slog and adding something completely new as a sort of amuse bouchée: A story mode.
Said story mode is called “Driven to Glory,” a faux-documentary based on the fictional GRID World Series that follows the trials and tribulations of Seneca Racing, a down-on-its-luck backmarker team looking to make it big in the Pro Leagues and disrupt the status quo by taking down long-time series antagonists Ravenwest Motorsport. It’s actually a lot more fun than it sounds.
The cast in particular is what makes the dish (To steal a quote from character Marcus Ado), with an excellent ensemble of characters that all have their own unique personalities: Nathan McKane is arrogant and brash, Yume Tanaka has a veneer of Kimi Räikkonen-esque steeliness and Valentin Manzi has a playful charm that adds some comic relief to what is otherwise a surprisingly dark storyline.
The plot is no narrative masterpiece and it certainly won’t win any Oscars, primarily due its predictability (I don’t want to spoil the ending for you but you probably already know what it is anyway), but it’s pretty solid and should keep your attention until the credits roll - And trust me, you do not want to skip the credits, the mid-credits scene is a worthy payoff.
Moving on from the story, we have the campaign. It’s largely the same as GRID 2019, but it’s been reworked to encourage less linear gameplay and more jumping between disciplines: Sponsor objectives usually require you to drive certain distances or do certain things in certain cars, upgrades encourage you to try as many cars as possible and find one from each class that suits your driving style and the greater variety of events help keep things fresh. It’s a much more rewarding experience as a result, and a more fulfilling one too.
However, the game has some glaring issues that stop me from giving this a full five stars. The AI is my first port of call - It sucks.
Ok, that’s exaggerating a little. They’re not terrible - They’re actually pretty smart and every driver has their own personality that makes each one just as fun to race against as the last, but they’re far too slow. Even on the highest “Legend” difficulty, I found myself winning races by over 5 seconds with incredible ease, and that was whilst handicapping myself by using the slowest car in each class.
Next is the vehicle balance. Some classes have cars that simply do not belong, whether that’s because they’re too fast or too slow. Trackday Hypercars is the perfect example: The Bugatti Veyron SS is the second fastest car in the entire game in terms of top speed, making it hideously overpowered on speed tracks. Meanwhile, the Ferrari FXX-K has to share a track with this damn thing, and if the track you’re racing on has a straight longer than 0.5 Miles you’re gonna have a bad day. I could go on, but really some cars need to be moved around or even placed in their own class.
Finally, the graphics & sound design. Generally, GRID Legends is a pretty good looking game. It even manages to improve upon its predecessor with improved reflections to make rain look a bit less flat and higher-resolution shadows for some satisfying trackside lighting when racing under the stars. However, the hyperreal visual design starts to hurt your eyes after a little while, with blinding lights that inexplicably cast fog across the track even if it isn’t actually foggy and so much visual noise that it can be hard to decipher what’s going on half the time.
Sounds are also pretty good in most cases: Cars are varied in tone and exhaust note, ranging from ear-piercing shrieks to earth-shaking burbles, the environmental audio is fully reactive (Listen out for those screaming fans when you nail a daring inside pass) and the soundtrack is energetic. However, some cars are a little too quiet and easily get lost in the background if you have the music turned on, and there is an element of sound file recycling for vehicles with exotic engines such as Rotaries.
Overall, GRID Legends takes what Codemasters has learnt from the tepid reception to the series’ 2019 reboot and builds on it, with a more open-ended career structure that encourages experimentation, improved visuals for a more next-gen feel and some physics tweaks to make the game more accessible to newcomers. I wholly recommend buying GRID Legends, at least on offer, especially if you didn’t like its predecessor. The GRID is waiting… and trust me, it’s much healthier this time around.
GRID Legends feels almost like an apology for the terminally dull series reboot back in 2019, a game that was so devoid of personality it felt like playing through a game that was made whilst watching a tutorial about how to build a functional racing game: You buy cars, you race them, you win said races, you buy more cars with the money you just won, cycle repeats. By the time I got to the final faceoff against Ravenwest I was functioning entirely on autopilot.
GRID Legends fixes that by bringing back some fan-favourite game modes such as Elimination and Multiclass Racing, touching up the visuals to make the game more colourful, adjusting the progression to make things less of a slog and adding something completely new as a sort of amuse bouchée: A story mode.
Said story mode is called “Driven to Glory,” a faux-documentary based on the fictional GRID World Series that follows the trials and tribulations of Seneca Racing, a down-on-its-luck backmarker team looking to make it big in the Pro Leagues and disrupt the status quo by taking down long-time series antagonists Ravenwest Motorsport. It’s actually a lot more fun than it sounds.
The cast in particular is what makes the dish (To steal a quote from character Marcus Ado), with an excellent ensemble of characters that all have their own unique personalities: Nathan McKane is arrogant and brash, Yume Tanaka has a veneer of Kimi Räikkonen-esque steeliness and Valentin Manzi has a playful charm that adds some comic relief to what is otherwise a surprisingly dark storyline.
The plot is no narrative masterpiece and it certainly won’t win any Oscars, primarily due its predictability (I don’t want to spoil the ending for you but you probably already know what it is anyway), but it’s pretty solid and should keep your attention until the credits roll - And trust me, you do not want to skip the credits, the mid-credits scene is a worthy payoff.
Moving on from the story, we have the campaign. It’s largely the same as GRID 2019, but it’s been reworked to encourage less linear gameplay and more jumping between disciplines: Sponsor objectives usually require you to drive certain distances or do certain things in certain cars, upgrades encourage you to try as many cars as possible and find one from each class that suits your driving style and the greater variety of events help keep things fresh. It’s a much more rewarding experience as a result, and a more fulfilling one too.
However, the game has some glaring issues that stop me from giving this a full five stars. The AI is my first port of call - It sucks.
Ok, that’s exaggerating a little. They’re not terrible - They’re actually pretty smart and every driver has their own personality that makes each one just as fun to race against as the last, but they’re far too slow. Even on the highest “Legend” difficulty, I found myself winning races by over 5 seconds with incredible ease, and that was whilst handicapping myself by using the slowest car in each class.
Next is the vehicle balance. Some classes have cars that simply do not belong, whether that’s because they’re too fast or too slow. Trackday Hypercars is the perfect example: The Bugatti Veyron SS is the second fastest car in the entire game in terms of top speed, making it hideously overpowered on speed tracks. Meanwhile, the Ferrari FXX-K has to share a track with this damn thing, and if the track you’re racing on has a straight longer than 0.5 Miles you’re gonna have a bad day. I could go on, but really some cars need to be moved around or even placed in their own class.
Finally, the graphics & sound design. Generally, GRID Legends is a pretty good looking game. It even manages to improve upon its predecessor with improved reflections to make rain look a bit less flat and higher-resolution shadows for some satisfying trackside lighting when racing under the stars. However, the hyperreal visual design starts to hurt your eyes after a little while, with blinding lights that inexplicably cast fog across the track even if it isn’t actually foggy and so much visual noise that it can be hard to decipher what’s going on half the time.
Sounds are also pretty good in most cases: Cars are varied in tone and exhaust note, ranging from ear-piercing shrieks to earth-shaking burbles, the environmental audio is fully reactive (Listen out for those screaming fans when you nail a daring inside pass) and the soundtrack is energetic. However, some cars are a little too quiet and easily get lost in the background if you have the music turned on, and there is an element of sound file recycling for vehicles with exotic engines such as Rotaries.
Overall, GRID Legends takes what Codemasters has learnt from the tepid reception to the series’ 2019 reboot and builds on it, with a more open-ended career structure that encourages experimentation, improved visuals for a more next-gen feel and some physics tweaks to make the game more accessible to newcomers. I wholly recommend buying GRID Legends, at least on offer, especially if you didn’t like its predecessor. The GRID is waiting… and trust me, it’s much healthier this time around.
2022
Gran Turismo 7 is what happens when somebody has so much fun knowing that they could that they didn’t stop to think whether they should. Kazunori Yamauchi’s borderline fetish for awkward design choices reaches its ugly peak with a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be.
The career mode is basically a barely 10-Hour long slog of fetch quests, with the odd side objective thrown in to stop you from getting bored. Most of them involve going to a location on the World Map and using one of its facilities, a process that takes approximately thirty seconds.
This is made more frustrating by the fact that Gran Turismo 7 seems to assume that the player has never seen a car in real life nor knows what a car is, with tutorials that are so patronising and AI that are so catastrophically slow that it feels like an insult directed towards long-time fans of the series. Even after completing all of the menu books, which unlocks a bunch of harder “Expert Level” races, the AI still pose little to no challenge.
Buying cars to use in races requires a level of grinding I have never seen before in a racing game, thanks to pitifully low payouts for many of the game’s early races. Some of the post-endgame events are more generous, with WTC800 at Sardegna currently the best race in the game for grinding cash, but the sometimes obscene prices for cars again makes it a slog. Legendary Cars Dealership, you know who you are.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. GT7 is arguably the best demonstration of the PlayStation 5’s capabilities, with stunning visuals tied together by gorgeous lighting and almost nonexistent loading times thanks to lightning-fast SSD technology.
The physics are satisfying and direct, with punishing consequences for pushing too hard. However, it never feels unfair except for the odd car or two. Those are the exception, rather than the rule.
Sport Mode is a clusterfuck, but it’s a fun clusterfuck. Racing in the No DR/SR Tracking races is beautiful carnage, with paint being traded for several laps straight, whilst the ranked races are generally a little bit calmer if still unhinged at times and really help with practicing close-quarters racing if you can find a lobby that doesn’t have too many morons.
Finally is something that was missing from Gran Turismo Sport: A sense of ownership. Every car is like a Tamagotchi, with three base stats that deteriorate as you drive them - Oil, Engine and Chassis. Over time, you have to perform maintenance on these cars, which makes you feel like you truly are the owner of a custom-built Toyota GR86 that pumps out almost 400hp through that fully customisable Manual transmission you installed.
In Gran Turismo 7, cars are not just your primary means of competition - They are living, breathing creatures with a heart and soul. And that’s what the game tries to teach you during those agonising 10 hours of listening to some nondescript Italian man tell you how Rallying works, even though you own or have owned every single game in the Colin McRae Rally/DiRT series and play them every single day.
Buy Gran Turismo 7, but only if you can live with a glorified 10 hour long tutorial. And you don’t mind Always Online DRM. Otherwise, something like Need for Speed or Forza is probably more your… Speed.
The career mode is basically a barely 10-Hour long slog of fetch quests, with the odd side objective thrown in to stop you from getting bored. Most of them involve going to a location on the World Map and using one of its facilities, a process that takes approximately thirty seconds.
This is made more frustrating by the fact that Gran Turismo 7 seems to assume that the player has never seen a car in real life nor knows what a car is, with tutorials that are so patronising and AI that are so catastrophically slow that it feels like an insult directed towards long-time fans of the series. Even after completing all of the menu books, which unlocks a bunch of harder “Expert Level” races, the AI still pose little to no challenge.
Buying cars to use in races requires a level of grinding I have never seen before in a racing game, thanks to pitifully low payouts for many of the game’s early races. Some of the post-endgame events are more generous, with WTC800 at Sardegna currently the best race in the game for grinding cash, but the sometimes obscene prices for cars again makes it a slog. Legendary Cars Dealership, you know who you are.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. GT7 is arguably the best demonstration of the PlayStation 5’s capabilities, with stunning visuals tied together by gorgeous lighting and almost nonexistent loading times thanks to lightning-fast SSD technology.
The physics are satisfying and direct, with punishing consequences for pushing too hard. However, it never feels unfair except for the odd car or two. Those are the exception, rather than the rule.
Sport Mode is a clusterfuck, but it’s a fun clusterfuck. Racing in the No DR/SR Tracking races is beautiful carnage, with paint being traded for several laps straight, whilst the ranked races are generally a little bit calmer if still unhinged at times and really help with practicing close-quarters racing if you can find a lobby that doesn’t have too many morons.
Finally is something that was missing from Gran Turismo Sport: A sense of ownership. Every car is like a Tamagotchi, with three base stats that deteriorate as you drive them - Oil, Engine and Chassis. Over time, you have to perform maintenance on these cars, which makes you feel like you truly are the owner of a custom-built Toyota GR86 that pumps out almost 400hp through that fully customisable Manual transmission you installed.
In Gran Turismo 7, cars are not just your primary means of competition - They are living, breathing creatures with a heart and soul. And that’s what the game tries to teach you during those agonising 10 hours of listening to some nondescript Italian man tell you how Rallying works, even though you own or have owned every single game in the Colin McRae Rally/DiRT series and play them every single day.
Buy Gran Turismo 7, but only if you can live with a glorified 10 hour long tutorial. And you don’t mind Always Online DRM. Otherwise, something like Need for Speed or Forza is probably more your… Speed.