Sebastien Loeb Rally EVO is an all-new off-road competitive racing experience from the most successful driver in WRC history: Sebastien Loeb. It is also the first rally racing game for the new generation consoles. Mar 06, 2017 Sebastien Loeb Rally EVO is an all-new off-road competitive racing experience from the most successful driver in WRC history: Sebastien Loeb. It is also the first rally racing game for the new generation consoles. Drive iconic rally cars from past and present and take part in famous rallies and off-road events from around the world.
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Your immediate entry into the world of WRC is a quick glance over how rallying works. If you have never watched WRC or don't understand the role of a co-driver, then it is highly recommend to go over the tutorials that are presented to you at the start.
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The gameplay tutorials have you driving around a track and trying to beat a set time while telling you the controls and how to use them. It's basic stuff, but the real tutorial that's needed is understanding all of the co-pilot signs.Instead of going through a single long track to demonstrate how the co-pilot's notes works, you're instead given a screen with a few pages to convey the philosophy behind the system. When hurtling down the expansive sea of black, you will need to know what's coming towards you and how to navigate through a set of corners in quick succession.
These instructions are given to you well in advance by the co-pilot with the necessary icon showing up either at the top of the screen or, if you've switched the 3D option on, actually on the road ahead of you. Thankfully you can turn these helpful images off if you feel brave enough.Once you've gone through your training exercises you'll want to finally get into the world of WRC. The available options to you are quite simple - Quick Mode, Career, Multiplayer, and Loeb Experience. The majority of your gameplay experience will be through the career as a lot of the options are locked off to you otherwise. Even worse is Rallycross, where it's imperative to know your position on the road in relation to others around you; even in real life you need some form or peripheral vision to see your surroundings.
This is where things become a little odd. Your mirrors seem to negate the fact that there are other vehicles around you—well I guess I lie, they do show the vehicle’s steering columns.What also causes disorientation at times is that the mirrors, or anything with reflections, update at half the rate of the game.
When the game runs so buttery smooth at 60FPS, you would hope that the rest of the game would be like that too. Unfortunately, these reflections, and even the animations, are all seemingly set to 30FPS. This could be the cause of the disappearing vehicles in the mirrors as they're not updated to the framerate.Thankfully the majority of the events are Rally-based so peering into the mirrors isn't required so often, but when a vehicle has a reflective sheet veering the driver side window, then I found the best thing to do was to drive into the sides of the track to get rid of it; driving became easier after that.Those aren't the only issues either. The pop-ins are very noticeable and can be seen within fifty metres in front of you. There have been times where some objects don't show up in the distance, and on a snowy track with a tight hairpin coming up, it's hard to judge where the corner is until the barriers show up, and by that time you've passed your braking distance.
For a game that pits you in the middle of terrain so vast, it forces the designers into that sticky situation of what to focus on detail wise. While the game does looks splendid in places, specifically up close, it feels muddy compared to other Rally games. Hurtling past at 100mph the environments are so close that it's very difficult to take in any detail that is put into them, that is unless you start colliding into them, which will happen again, and again, and again!Seeing your vehicle fly in the air and roll after making a mistake is frustrating, but so much fun. Having your entire bodywork dented or falling off also adds authenticity to the Rally action, and you can even have your tyres fall off from your wheels - not ideal to drive around on rims but you can definitely have a good laugh at how bad of a driver you are!Again this is where the game starts to fall apart a bit.
The physics feel a little on the arcade side. At the start of any event you have the option to change the vehicle's settings, which is very diverse I might add, changing things from your rebounds, bumps, antiroll bars, brake bias, spring stiffness, gear ratios, ride heights, and more. But no matter what you do there doesn't seem to be any major changes in the handling of the vehicle; it's actually better to just leave the settings at default and be done with it.When you're using the controller the vehicles feel very heavy but are workable (feels like too much understeer), with the wheel the controllability of the vehicles actually feels much better and the game certainly plays much better with a wheel. Precision is everything in a Rally game and unless you have a wheel then you're not going to be able to shave those dozens of seconds off your times. The controller is plenty good enough for a fun time though.
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