WRCP is an arcade racer made with the same engine, graphics and license of the mainstream WRC series, but with quite a different gameplay.
The only single-player mode available has you racing through 8 locations, each having 3 stages playable with any of the 3 car classes available: WRC, Class 2 and Class 3, the latter being the less powerful of the 3. Each class has lots of cars to choose from, but you have to unlock them before being able to, and the same applies to the stages.
You'll be racing with 3 other cars here, so there'll be 4 players driving at once in the same stage at the same time, and the aim of the game is to end first, with any mean necessary.
Ending 1st in a stage will earn you a gold medal and will unlock either another stage or a new car.
To win, the game allows you to do anything you want, like hitting your opponents as hard as you want to. Cars do not actually have real damage, though the game shows it happening, as parts of your car will detach from it and fly away when you hit or are being hit, but that doesn't impair your performance. WRCP also has bonuses spread over the tracks, which when collected, will give you some random power to use against your opponents. These are nicely thought and varied, and the game actually only give you a bonus that is worth for your actual position in the race, like the shield and turbo are given mostly when you're first, while bonuses that aims at hitting opponents ahead of you, and which will not do anything if they are behind, will not be given.
Racing is easy as this is an arcade game, but not baby-like easy, as even normal difficulty can give you problems beating the computer if you don't learn to race well enough. Fortunately, the game allows you to change difficulty at any time, without the need to restart the championship, and you can retry any stage as many times you want to without problems.
The game is fun, has good graphics, has multiplayer, allows you to upload your times to the leaderboards and it's very cheap, but then why I don't recommend it? Because eveything it does, it does it wrong.
The engine is the same as WRC but there you only race with 1 car and you have limited sight, while here you have 4 cars at the same time on screen and a very long distance of sight, and that pushes the limits of this, outdated, engine, and the result is terrible performance.
Of course you can lower details/resolution, but the graphics, although good, are not really modern and should run much better than it does, and anyway it seem to be related to some specific special effects, as some locations have worse performance than others. I can play it smooth, don't get me wrong, but some stage is stuttering bad and I'm sure it won't run as well as in my system on cheaper computers.
Another bad thing is controls. Obviously, the main part of any racing game is the gameplay and the control, and this game shows the worst here. It supports dinput devices as well as xinput but you can't reconfigure anything. You either play as they want you to, or you don't, and I can assure you that the dinput setup is completely messed up.
The single player mode is not bad but it's pointless. The only meaning of this mode is to unlock everything, maybe to be able to play online with the stuff you unlock but I can't report about it, and you'll know why later. They could have added some more SP modes because once you complete this, I don't think you'll play it again.
Also, cars unlocking is just plain stupid. You would expect the game unlocks better and better cars for each class, with increasing power, but it's not like that. It often unlocks a very powerful car, then for like 10 stages you only unlock worse ones, which you will never use as they all play the same and are just less powerful, meaning they wasted alot of 3d models there. :P
Also, because you only unlock cars after you earn a gold medal, the last 3 most powerful cars for each class are unlocked in the last stage, meaning you'll complete the game before getting to use them. You can certainly play again and choose those cars, but it sounds pointless to me.
You only have one view in the game, a bird's view, which might look cool on screenshots but actually is really bad, as often you can't see you car because it's behind some tree and the camera don't follow it instantly as it's a bit "lagged" behind, which is another stupid choice from the developers.
The topping is the multiplayer mode and the leaderboards, both of which requires you to register an account with Milestone's own system. This game uses Steamworks for worthless achievements, but not for leaderboards and MP...good idea eh?
The process is simple and fast, only that...it doesn't work. Yeah you've read it right. Like with ANY other game made by Milestone, MP/leaderboards never works. It sometimes does for some people, but it mostly don't, and you can read about player's complains everywhere on the internet and steam forums.
Milestone always say (the rare times they actually says something) that they are working on it to fix it asap, but I keep reading that sentence since the first WRC came out in 2010, and they never managed to fix anything.
In fact, they are known to be developers that releases games and then forget about them. They never release any patches, they never listen to customers, they never fix anything, they never been able to make their MP work. The rare times they released a patch for one of their games, it didn't work in most versions of the game and anyway it didin't fix what their customers asked them to fix.
I hate to say this as I'm Italian and they're one of the few mainstream developers we got here, but this is the truth: this is one of the worst developer around and you should not support them. If I didn't get this game for basically free with a bundle, I would have never bought anything from them.
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