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WRC 4 Review - PS2

Every rally game fan knows of the long-running battle between the Colin McRae Rally and WRC series. The Colin McRae Rally games were cruising along nicely when they began back on the PSone - that is, until the WRC, or World Rally Championship, decided to bring out an official series during the early years of the PlayStation 2. Since then, both the Colin McRae Rally and WRC games have been hitting shelves just before Christmas every year, and its no doubt that during these festive months each game's developer has been eyeing the other closely. Well, we've hit one of those periods once again. Colin McRae Rally 2005 and WRC 4 were released recently; which is the better of the two? Well, it's almost too close to call.

Gameplay

In addition to the standard Quick Race and Time Trial, WRC 4 features - as it always has - Championship and Events modes. The Championship mode takes you through a whole World Rally Championship as the title suggests, pulling you across the Earth and back to rallies in countries such as New Zealand, Sweden, Mexico, Australia and Turkey. However, this is not, in effect, the meat of the game; the Events mode contains just as much strength and you'll actually want to play it - we all know most of us generally leave Quick Race, Time Trial and other supporting modes featured in most games behind.

First of all, though, let's take a deeper look at the Championship mode. It contains, essentially, four championships, each being the same despite differing in difficulty and, in the case of the Super 1600 championship, cars. The other championships are the WRC Professional, WRC Expert and Extreme. That's right, there's no WRC Beginner or WRC Novice, and this reflects the game's often intense difficulty, even early on in the championship and especially in the frustratingly slippery Swedish stages. After selecting a championship, car and driver, the games begin. Unfortunately the excellent rally introductory movies present in previous WRC games have disappeared; you're now presented with - in a more bland fashion - descriptive text outlining the surface types to expect. Each rally and the championship as a whole is based on points earned by each driver according to what position they come in each stage, and these points determine the overall championship winner.

The game's Events mode contains some very unique, well, events, to take part in. The first is the Pro Driver Challenge, which contains a number of situations that a rally driver may encounter throughout his career. For example, one of them has you racing on a simple stage against other rally driver hopefuls - only beating them will see you be selected and allowed to progress. The Test Track event allows you to personally evaluate your abilities by offering a number of different surface and control tests. The Jumps test, for example, is a fairly straight stretch of dirt mound jumps. A time limit is present at the (continued next page)