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2021 officially marks the 49th season of the World Rally Championship, making WRC 10's 50th anniversary content a fraction premature.
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nearly two years of total turmoil, it's hard to lame anyone for wanting to celebrate their birthday early, the World Rally Championship included.
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To mark the moment, WRC 10 arrives armed with the most retro content to grace developer KT Racing's series so far, with a new mode featuring cars and stages representing five decades of rally racing history.
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Combined with a deep career mode the result is the spiciest and arguably the strongest official WRC game to date.
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Though that's a narrow victory, since it still hasn't changed dramatically since the already very good WRC 8 and WRC 9, and it's still making some of the same minor mistakes.
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That big 50th Anniversary mode is an important part of this year's game, and it's by far the biggest injection of historical content to the series since KT Racing started adding classic cars in WRC 8.
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With its own separate menu and period photography, it does feel quite special at first, although there's ultimately not really a great deal to it.
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They're just a small collection of time trials with a little bit of text to explain the historical context of what you're about to do.
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One significant issue that some may have with the Anniversary races is that the time requirements don't scale with the global difficulty setting.
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Inexperienced racers can dial down the intensity of their career in quick race difficulty, but at the time of review anniversary mode cannot be changed.
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I thought I was cruising when I notched up the first two events on my first attempts, but that changed on the extremely tough third event.
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Which is actually the fifth event, because confusingly the third and fourth events got skipped and remained unavailable.
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At least a couple of the time requirements I've subsequently encountered in this mode so far have been surprisingly stiff.
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It seems strange for WRC 10 to cater for new and novice players with a variety of settings, driver aids, and tutorials, but opt for a hardcore, one-size-fits-all approach for the marquee anniversary mode.
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The good news for anyone stopped by the taxing time limits in anniversary mode is that all these cars, and the historical stages, can be used in identical fashion in quick play without any such pressure.
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The older historical stages are a fun addition because KT Racing has stripped out the contemporary advertising and safety features of the modern stages and replace them with crowds of more period-authentic spectators, many of whom are poised dangerously close to the roadside.
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WRC 10's old-school crowds aren't anywhere near as thick as they were in the heyday of Group B⁽¹⁾ bedlam, but they definitely contain a few folks whose lifelong dream is to be killed by a rally car.