Recent reviews by Arete

Nice followup to the first xenonauts. Nice refresh with unity engine, and feels like the game is heading in the right direction. As of now in early access, only medium UFOs and no endgame, so can't tell how the rest will be, but so far a good improvement on the first 'nauts. Balance, tech and pace feels good so far.

Solid strategy game with a real challenge.

A scant few bugs are irritating at times, but not gamebreaking (sometimes divisions cancel a charge out of the blue, for example).
The AI is decent, usually not making extremelt silly mistakes. Overall good control and predictable behaviour.

A worthy update from the great but not perfect Dirt Rally. Handling is best to date, with dirt handling being the best ever in a a game. Tarmac still isn't perfect, but it's waaaaaay better than DR and D4, and very driveable.

New stages are great. There aren't a lot of them in the base game (about the same amount as DR), but we'll get some nice DLCs to flesh it out.

The car selection is OK at start, and has many of the old greats. What's really nice is that the cars have more personality than in earlier incarnations. It's more than just small changes in power and weight, now each car feels different in more ways.

Were some bad problems with the single player parts of "my team" that required always online at the beginning, but these problems appear to be solved now.

If you even remotely liked DR, then this is a must have. If you even remotely like rally or rallycross games, it's a must have.

WRC 7 makes good on the promises of WRC 6. I bought WRC 6 thinking it might be a nice game to play around with when not playing Dirt Rally. But the handling was too erratic (albeit with promise), the stages were wide and too arcadey, and the FFB was really bad.

Happy to say that WRC 7 improves on WRC 6 in every regard.
Car handling is up there on par with Dirt Rally. The feeling of the tyres digging into the gravel is not quite up to DRs levels, but the distinct grip level changes between different gravel types is real nice. Tarmac handling feels quite nice and believable. The cars feel like they have mass, and weight transfer is modeled nicely. Overall the handling has been a big surprise, and overall I find it more believable than DRs.

The stages are quite nice overall, much tighter and more technical than WRC 6. There aren't a lot of stages for each location, so I suspect they'll be feeling stale after a while (like in DR), but they're varied and distinct and many of them are absolutely fantastic. While I personally give DR a slight edge with their real to life stages, there are some stages in WRC 7 that I feel are better than DRs. And the epic stages are awesome, so much fun to finally drive long stages.

FFB is much better than WRC 6, but still nothing to write home about. I'd call it adequate on my T300RS. Not much to adjust, and it feels a bit like canned effects. Still, when you get the levels right (I found about 50% strength felt right) it works quite OK and communicates what the car does in a decent way. So fully functional, but can get better.

Codriver calls are overall OK. I find that I can trust them overall, and I seldom get caught out on bad notes. There are times when the note pace gets a bit off, but generally OK. Codriver voice is a bit sterile and machine-like, hopefully something they can improve for the next game.

Graphics are OK, neither good nor bad. Car models and stages look OK in general but "wow" moments are rare (there are some, like Mexico).

Sounds are OK. Gravel kickup and tyre squeals are good, as are brake sounds. Engine sounds range from slightly bad too OK. Some sounds feel quite off, like the loud bang when the suspension punches through that just sounds completely wrong. Crash sounds are also very muted and undramatic.

Stability wise I had some troubles for the first week, where I was one of many that got the heavy stutters even though I have real good hardware. Big Ben handled the problem well though, got a thread up about the problem and got some testers fast. New patch came out which fixed the problems for the vast majority and it seems to be trouble free now.

Overall I'd highly recommend this title for any rally fan. Surprise hit game of the year so far for me.

If you're into rally games, this is a must buy.

Best rally game in ages, highly recommended.