If there's one thing this generation has been crying out for, it's a decent rally game. There have been one or two, but on paper EA's WRC - developed by Codemasters (the folk who practically INVENTED the rally game), in the new Unreal 5 game engine, my expectations were sky high
You know what they say about sky-high expectations though. Be prepared to crash and burn.
Things began to unravel even before the full game was installed. Like many titles, EA WRC gives you a 'taster' before all the data downloads and transfers from disk. "Rally School" shows you how to handle the car, get through corners speedily, and obey the rules of rallying laid down in this official WRC title. Right off the bat I began to notice my old gaming nemesis creeping in as I started to get a feel for how the game looked and handled. Tearing - more accurately, a serious lack of V-Sync.
Worse than that, the game stuttered and dropped frames here there and everywhere. I figured I'd leap into the game settings menu to see what video tweaks I could make. Only there weren't any. None of the niceties we've seen in other titles such as the recent Spider-Man 2 where you can choose between visual splendour or rock solid framerates. Nope, not a smidge.
I gritted my teeth until the full game was installed. Once you start your career mode, you get a real insight into this being a 'proper' Rally game with team management, car setups and sponsor-led events being fed into your team's calendar as your fledgeling Rally career blossoms. But every single time you get behind the wheel those visual issues creep in, wrecking your sense of immersion and in some cases meaning the difference between shaving a few seconds off a target time (at one point the stuttering was so bad I ended up steering off the road into a bank of trees because of it).
So I was furious. A full priced game with no optimisation. Even with the (by now de rigeur) day one update, there was no improvement (in fact it actually felt like things got WORSE after the update). Even cut-scenes seemed to suffer (obviously rendered in the same game engine I guess).
Diving out onto Reddit and other forums, it seems the PS5 version isn't the only victim of poor coding and optimisation. High-end PC owners (you know, those regal folk who can afford to spend the same amount on their gaming rigs that you spent on your car) have been bitterly tearing EA and Codemasters a new one. The Unreal 5 Engine, the supposed herald of true next-generation gaming is, it seems, a bit of a resource hog at the best of times - great for short demos and stuff like the Matrix Unloaded showcase, but absolutely fucking awful for full games.
Ironically I've also been playing Milestone's excellent "Hot Wheels Unleashed 2" - a prime example of a game that looks brilliant, plays wonderfully, uses Unreal (though perhaps not Unreal 5) but doesn't suffer from any of the issues that EA's WRC does. No tearing, silky smooth framerates, plenty of visual tweaking options and a far better experience all round.
Codemasters' Dirt Rally 2.0 is a mere 6 or 7 quid on the Playstation store at the moment. If you don't already own it, my advice would be to miss this horrible pile of crap entirely, and go back and grab yourself a game from an era when Codemasters seemed to know what they were doing. Don't expect much in the way of improvement patches for this, I would be very surprised if it ever gets beyond its current state. Sure it's playable but if visual annoyances are your evil nemesis too, you're going to has as miserable a time with it as I have so far.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Comments
Post a Comment