I just got it on sale a few days ago. The career mode is fun. It's basically like RIDE. It's definitely a more interesting career mode than WRC 5. I finished all the Loeb Experience events.
There are a few gripes I have with the game though. I'm not particularly impressed with the physics honestly. The braking in particular is done very poorly. The cars are incredibly unstable under braking. Even on tarmac, with bias turned towards the front, braking intensity turned down, and diff coast set fully to locked the cars still always want to swap ends under hard braking. Cars really don't do that in real life unless you seriously unsettle the car while trail braking.
Car most certainly do this in real life, particularly when you are braking hard on a loose or damp surface, or one that is cambered and road worn, and particularly if the car is not running ABS (as rally cars don't).
Its both perfectly realistic and quite easy to counter, just as you would in reality you lift in the brakes to settle the rear and then reapply the brakes, however you do have to take car not to lock the wheels. Nor is it an inevitability every time you brake, as good threshold braking will stop it occurring a lot of the time.
The cars don't have enough sense of weight. Going over every crest the car always wants to go flying, even at modest speeds. So every time there is a corner after a crest, you'd better slow down to a crawl, or end up spearing off the road. Cars also roll over too easily. And even on the smoothest course like Pike's Peak, the cars constantly bounce around. It's like they're trying too hard to make the cars drift like you'd expect in rallying, instead of making the physics realistic and having the driver actually work to initiate slides. I find that the cars are always either severely understeering or oversteering, rarely balanced in between.
I don't find this to be the case as all, with the cars having a good weight and steering feel, particularity in comparison to the floaty mess that is WRC5. I also find it perfectly possible to balance the cars, and again far easier that in WRC5, for reasons I will explain in a moment.
In terms of physics, I don't really think SLRE is any better than WRC 5. If anything, I think it might even be a slight step down.
I could not agree with you less. WRC5 runs a fixed centre rotation physics model that should have died a death once we left the PS2 era (it was one of the hallmarks of the early Colin MacRae series. It results in cars that don't behave in an even remotely realistic manner at all.
The pace notes are also not great. They're better than WRC 5 most of the time in that when set to give Very Early they're usually given early enough in advance for you to actually start slowing down to make the corner. There are occasions where that is not the case, but it's still vastly better than WRC 5. The biggest problem I have with pace notes is that I don't think they're very accurate half the time. I find that corners are very often tighter than what's given in the pace notes. I'd really rather they have erred on the side of caution rather than what it is now. If the corners were shallower than the pace notes, I might take the corner a little more slowly than necessary. But the way it is now, I go spearing off the road. And sometimes they're just not precise enough. Like sometimes he says "6 right tightens", but he doesn't say what it tightens to. If it tightens from 6 to like a 2, and he doesn't tell me, it's not very helpful.
While the paces note are not as good as those in DiRT they are better than the ones in WRC5, and it may be a personal thing but the WRC5 co-driver annoys the hell out of me with his random shouting.
For some of the classes, there is very clearly one best car, and if you don't use that car you basically have to turn the AI down considerably to win. For example, in the 70's class, on a long ~10km stage, there is probably a good 30s difference between the BMW 2002 and the Mini Cooper. For things like that, they probably should have split the classes up further. But at least in the 70's class, the BMW and the Lancia are pretty close. In Class 4, the Stratos is clearly the single best car by a wide margin. I usually play on Hard AI, and am occasionally competitive on Realistic, but if I play Class 4 rallies and don't want to use the Stratos, I basically have to turn it down to Easy. There is also a weird instance where the '99 Focus Rally Car is in a different class than the '99 Lancer Evolution 6 Rally Car, even though they directly competed against each other in the same year.
While I would agree that some of the baalncing is an issue and the class mixes in a few cases odd, its still a far better car selection than WRC5 could even dream of.
Last thing is course design. Most of the courses are fun, but there are a few that are just really not enjoyable. I don't know if they model it after real world stages, and maybe the stages just suck in real life. The Chocolate stage in Mexico is just atrocious. It is seriously unnecessarily tight and bumpy. You're basically slogging through the stage driving like a granny in 2nd or 3rd gear using mostly about half throttle. And it's not just because I suck that I have to drive like that. I drive like that and actually achieve times that is competitive with the Realistic AI, so it's actually what you're supposed to do. It wouldn't be so bad if it was a short stage, but it's one of the longest stages in the game. That stage is seriously the least enjoyable stage I have ever played in any rally game, ever. I watched some footage of a real life stage called El Chocolate in Mexico (I'm assuming they modeled the in game stage after that one), and it doesn't seem to be nearly as bumpy. There is also a stage in the Alsace rally that pretty much half the corners are after crests, so you have to slow to a crawl before every crest or else not make the corner.
Um I'm not sure how I can break this too you, but in this regard you are just plain wrong.
Now you may prefer the stages in WRC5, but they are not realistic at all, rather they are inspired by the location of the rally rather than any attempt to accuratly recraete the stages tehmselves. The vast majority don't even foloow the stage directions and all of them are far, far too wide.
SLRE on the other hand use the stage GPS data and on-board footage to get them as close to the real thing as they could:
I'm utterly confused that you complain about Rally Mexico stages being so tight, bumpy and twisty that you need to use part throttle and mainly 2nd and 3rd! That's exactly what Rally Mexico's El Chocolate is known for, being a tight technical challenge. Hell every stage in Rally Greece was like that when it was on the calender.
Rally is not just about the fast, open flowing events like Finland, Sweden or Poland, and the tight, technical car-breakers are as much a part of the sport.
That probably seems like a lot of gripes, but I do actually enjoy the game. I'd give it 8.5/10 overall. For comparison, I'd give WRC 5 8.0/10. SLRE for me basically just beats WRC 5 in terms of career mode. Also, WRC 5 has this idiotic thing where the AI times are always adjusted to be within around a second of your time.
As you may have been able to tell I don't agree that its a narrow win for SLRE, but a win by quite a margin.
If you are interested in more information about why I hold that view you may want to take a look at this thread:
https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/rally-comparison-wrc-5-vs-slre-vs-dirt-rally.348973/
Which is a WRC5 vs SLRE vs DiRT Rally comparison thread.
