TL;DR: EA Sports WRC is another excellent offroad entry into Codemasters' already heavy bag of racing titles that offers a brilliant mix of frustration, pain, motion sickness and satisfaction, but don't pick it up if you're playing on Steam Deck/Linux, because you ain't playing ♥♥♥♥ due to kernel-level anti-cheat measures. Thanks, EA.

I once heard it said that "rally is basically a person with no arms or legs trying to navigate a blind person through a minefield". I'm happy to report that EA Sports WRC is one of the few titles that actually manages to bring that feeling home.

I don't play with a controller, but I understand if you do. If you are playing on a controller, without trying to sound like an elitist, I highly recommend to stop and get a wheel, you will have a much better time. Once you are racing with a wheel, you'll notice that it feels extremely similar to Dirt Rally 2.0's handling model, but better in every way. Tarmac stages still feel floaty like you're about to take off, but the cars have a better sense of weight to them, and are overall more sticky. On loose surfaces the feeling, while not flawless, is a marked improvement from the previous sim-like title.

This game's predecessors have been noted as being "the Dark Souls of motorsports titles", and this doesn't disappoint. Even with the improved handling model, if you aren't actually concentrating on the car and listening to your co-driver, you will end up cutting where you shouldn't and wrapping your car around a pole, tree or spectator, cliffside optional. Every single call your co-driver makes is incredibly important to get right. There's an art to this that I have yet to completely master, even with hundreds of hours in other rally sims, but there's still an immense feeling of satisfaction when you get a clean run through a stage and you've only just beaten out your opponent for the stage or overall win.

Speaking of cars, there's a plethora of them to choose from in various classes, with some returning favourites like the Subaru Impreza '95, Seat Ibiza Kit Car and the Group B monsters all a part of the roster. With Codies now having the WRC license, it also has a quite faithful recreation of the 2023 WRC season (as well as '24 with a DLC purchase) and all of the current WRC, WRC2 and Junior WRC vehicles. You can also create your own vehicle in the Builder if you so desire, though the end result usually just looks like you went diving through a parts bin and slapped something together before the project was due.

There's a fully fleshed out Career Mode that starts off well, but does get quite repetitive after some time. If you're into the whole team management thing, this would probably be more your speed, but if you just want seat time, I'd recommend just diving into either the Championship or Quick Race modes, which are pretty self-explanatory. I did notice that the AI scales differently from Dirt Rally 2.0 and skews towards the "easier" end of the spectrum, so you may need to increase your difficulty number from DR2 for a proper challenge.

With anything, there are negatives, and the biggest one is, unexpectedly, EA themselves. About 9 months after release, an update came out that introduced kernel-level anti-cheat, making this game impossible to play on platforms running Linux, like the Steam Deck or other handhelds. While I'm not surprised, and am genuinely angry at EA for this decision (not Codies, not their fault), I also currently run Windows for my sim rig with no plans on moving away from that, so this decision doesn't affect me. Your mileage may vary.

Overall, this ticks enough boxes for me that picking it up was an absolute no-brainer, and my expectations were exceeded. 8/10, would be a 9/10 if EA removed the anti-cheat.