If you’re looking for a better modern rally game than Dirt Rally, you can stop looking; it doesn’t exist, and WRC 6

see deal WRC 6 FIA World Rally Championship - Xbox One $29.99 on Gamestop

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WRC 6’s strongest feature is its narrow and lengthy stages. The sense of velocity is also terrific because of the cramped, obstacle-lined roads; even modest speeds feel fast when hazards are whipping by in such close proximity to your car. There’s a great variety of stages as they’re spread across all 14 countries from the 2016 World Rally Championship, and there are a number of extremely technical two-car Super Special Stages amongst them (though no rallycross tracks).

While there’s not a huge number of stages per country, that’s about twice the amount of locations featured in Dirt Rally. However, WRC 6’s stages are nowhere near as handsome. They also lack pizazz; the water-splash effect in WRC 6, for instance, is an abject anticlimax. Crashing through shallow water should be dramatic, highlight-reel stuff, but in WRC 6 it’s a forgettable effect a generation or two behind the curve.

Snow joke, really.

WRC 6’s cars seem sharp, well-detailed, and about on par with its peers. They show sufficient visual damage, though some of the scratch effects seem a little low-res when viewed from bonnet cam. Unfortunately there isn’t a huge amount of cars (no iconic classics or retro ’90s rally legends like you’ll find in Dirt Rally or Sébastien Loeb Rally Evo) and this is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of WRC 6. Being limited to just the current crop of strikingly similar-looking hatchbacks is a shame, but at least they feel pretty good behind the wheel.

Don’t get me wrong; WRC 6 doesn’t boast sim-like handling as sublime as you’ll find in Dirt Rally, but it does require a little more finesse than a pure arcade rally experience, like Sega Rally, or the RalliSport Challenge games of old. There’s a nice sense of weight to the cars as you grab the handbrake and heft them into tight corners, plus decent distinction between surface types. I’m not a fan of the chase cam, which feels a little too stiff and unwieldy for the fairly grippy handling model, but WRC 6 is still very forgiving, even on its most challenging “simulation” settings.

Engine audio is passable (though it’s turned down by default in the menus; I highly recommend cranking it back up), but the sound overall could do with more love. It definitely still lacks the real rasp and throatiness you’d expect from a rally car, and environmental effects don’t contribute much to the overall audio tapestry (for example, kick-up and road noise is way too subtle). There are moments where WRC 6 should be nothing short of deafening, like in the cabin of a high-revving rally car clawing over loose gravel under an extremely low hovering camera chopper, and it just… isn’t.

Ready to make like Van Halen?

The pacenotes get the job done (and you can choose between simple and more complex instructions) but they’re old-school in implementation; stitched together from a soundboard and a tad robotic, and not a patch on Dirt Rally’s unique pacenotes for each individual stage. They also trip over themselves slightly during multiple rapid corners, but they’re decent enough.

Career mode doesn’t innovate but it does a respectable job of putting us in the service park between stages and adding just enough window dressing to ensure our trip from the Junior WRC to the top tier isn’t entirely menu-based. The result falls well short of, say, F1 2016, but it does inject the career campaign with a little more race-day flavour than the admittedly sterile Dirt Rally.