: - the best stage design in any rally game ever, and it's really not even close. The number of stages is definitely one of the main selling points for this game; a truly outstanding roster of events
- surprisingly fun career mode where finances matter just enough that you actually need to pay some attention to them, without needing to micromanage everything. Very clever design for maintenance events, wherein the distance you run during a quick sprint equates to how repaired your car gets, which I thought was a great way to turn something that could have been boring into a fine excuse for even more rallying
- massively improved performance over WRC 10
- very intuitive-feeling ffb that conveys weight transfer excellently (though has other shortcomings mentioned in the cons below)
: - very poor interior car sounds, almost as though there simply isn't much bass to them. Everything is very thin-sounding and not as impactful and snarling as it should be
- interior cameras are way too rigid and jerk around in a really jarring and unrealistic way at times, like if you barely touch a snowbank
- throttle bug can be a nuisance. For me, rescaling the pedals fixed it, but for others this does not appear to work
- handbrake behaves somewhat strangely and in my opinion rotates the car far harder than it should
- game refuses to launch in fullscreen for me and i have to set it to fullscreen in the options every single time i boot
- some things like piles of rocks seem to be invisible to both the ffb and the audio. There are a lot of times where I'd expect some rocks banging against the undercarriage and rattling my wheel, but get nothing at all like I was on smooth tarmac
- seat/camera positioning is as awful as it's always been in WRC games, and they continue to refuse to put the FOV on a scale any human can make sense of
This game reminds me very much of Sebastian Loeb Rally EVO, where if your equipment fell into the narrow window of compatibility you likely had a good time with the game, and if your equipment didn't it was one of the most aggravating gaming experiences you've ever had. If you liked previous WRC games, this is basically a greatest hits album celebrating the series, so don't expect anything new and revolutionary, just a big old pile of everything you've previously come to expect from these games.