izigame.me

With a heavy heart, I do not recommend this game. Yes, EA Anti Cheat was the straw that broke the camel's back. In few weeks I won't be able to play this game at all.
First, let me say that I appreciate the amount of content in this game. 250 hours and I still don't have even half of stage memorized. Driving is great fun (mostly) and FFB has been hugely improved from DR 2.0. When the game is fun, you have a blast and can look past it's issues. When you find a good, competitive club, it's beyond satisfying to end up on a podium.
So let me be clear, it's not a BAD game at all. It's mediocre to good depending on your affection level for rally, your setup etc. Even still, I just can't find it in myself to actually recommend it with clean conscience.
I'm a Linux gamer, and be no means I think that I should receive any special treatment BUT the game actually worked perfectly fine for seven months (and had better performance vs Windows on my 5800X3D/6800XT). Adding a incompatible anti-cheat measure just seems like a rug pull at thins point. Yeah, I've had my fun with this game, even bought a full sim rig for it, but I don't feel like I'm ready to give it up. I feel I have at least another 250 hours of fun ahead. It's strange that sims like ACC, iRacing, rFactor 2 and others actually play nice on Linux (iRacing being our newest addition to the Linux simracing community) but WRC, a Leaderboard-based game, needs to have such a deep integration with the system, even with full telemetry sent to EA.
I don't trust EA with my system. EA Anti cheat had confirmed issues that bricked windows installation completely. It's an attack vector so severe, that if it's ever exploited, we have another WannaCry situation. Moreover, I use my PC for work as well and even if such anti cheat worked on linux, I would still be opposed to it's use and inclusion. Somehow Trackmania is leaderboard-based as well and they don't need kernel-level anti cheat. Maybe WRC team should have a chat with Nadeo? I won't install Windows just to play this one game. I'll just move to ACC/BeamNG, Truck Simulator. Maybe a virtual machine could be a way to "mitigate" but it's yet unclear if EA anti cheat bans for VM usage.
Apart from that, there are still a myriad, unfixed issues with the game. None of them are game-breaking, but they do add up to a very mixed package.
Career is still boring and the same season after season. There's NO randomization at all.
Livery editor is somehow worse than NFS Carbon. At least I don't care for liveries much, but for people that do, it's a real pain.
Performance issues at the end of the stages are still unfixed. If you have a beefy CPU, your framerate can be cut in half by some unexplainable reason. 7 months and nothing to indicate they are even working on fixing it.
Anisotropic Filtering still produces ungodly amount of flicker, aliasing and artefacting. To see a 2023 game which has broken mip mapping is just hilarious. This is such a basic feature, that even PS2 had it working in basically every game. These are complete basics that are handled by Unreal Engine itself, so they had do really try to break it. Yet, night runs can end up giving you a headache. Their resolution? Lower AF to x2 and use TAA + upscaling to "fix" it.
UI is a complete mess. Very unintuitive, requires a lot of inputs, submenus, transition effects that slow down navigation. The stupidest decision was to make main manu a bar that's located at the BOTTOM of the screen. Exactly where a lot of sim setups will be obscuring it. How did that even pass QA? Jon Armstrong never complained about it?
While aspects of physics were improved from DR 2.0 (tarmac feels waaay better) and they are quite enjoyable overall, the changes made RWD cars neigh unlivable. They require ungodly amounts of counter steer, lightning-quick reflexes and bonkers setups. There are maybe two RWD cars that could be made enjoyable. Oversteer is just comically overstated. It sint helped by...
Weird power mapping. All the cars, not even Group B turbolag monsters just feel sluggish at less than half RPM. Even modern Rally1 cars feel like your mum's Avensis or Volvo if not constantly near the redline. Group B cars can't accelerate from 20 kph in the first gear. Something went very bad and somehow we ended up with a situation similar to the throttle bug in WRC:Generations. Yes, it's not that noticeable if you're always driving modern cars or just keep changing gears like a madman, but especially with RWD turbo cars, it adds another reason to suddenly loose all traction and spin out. I honestly started avoiding RWD as it became less fun and more a chore. If you have more fun with FWD than RWD, something went wrong.
The use of Unreal Engine is not really something that should be positive/negative. It's a tool and can be used quite effectively. The sheer size of the stages is a big plus and the first time you could experience rally like that. The problem? UE was NOT used properly. Graphically there are a lot of strange decisions or just issues coming from unfamiliarity. SDR pipeline is honestly broken and a lot of times you can't see the road as it's overexposured to hell. There's a lot of shader compilation stutter, and the devs aren't willing to properly resolve it (with a proper precompilation pass). Playing on linux helps as Steam distributes shader cache you can compile yourself on your machine (precompiled for steam deck). As stated before, AF is completely broken, as is TAA without upscaling. Upscaling itself, be it FSR/DLSS seems implemented poorly. There are a lot of effects that frankly never been tested without TAA so they just break the image if you turn it off. Cars in the main menu appear super blurry without the use of FSR/DLSS. Reflections consume absolutely crazy amounts of GPU compute power despite the fact, they look worse than reflections in Dirt 3 (no joke). They look even worse with any amount of upscaling (grainy, super artifacty). You should basically turn off mirrors and turn reflection to ultra low from the get go.
But wait! Reflections are annoyingly broken in the interior and you CAN'T turn these off. Some cars are almost unlivable in cockpit cam due to this issue. This is again something that didn't change in the 7 months since release.
They recently made it so you can't reset your car if you're above 10 kph. That's actually great as you can't "exploit" car reset anymore. The only issue is that now you can't reset your car if you're stuck on your roof! Many people get DSQ from club runs as this happens to them. Release a hotfix to at least roll back the change it's it's fixed? Nope
All in all, I have a love/hate relationship with this game and can't really recommend it. Try at your own risk, but maybe don't try it yet if you're not a fan of rally.