Sébastien Loeb is the most successful driver in the history of the World Rally Championship (WRC). With nine consecutive championship titles, being second overall at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race, as well as strong showings in the World Touring Car Championship and the FIA GT series, Sébastien Loeb is one of the all-time greatest drivers not just in rallying, but in all of motorsport. A true legend.
With the developers freshly unleashed from the restraints of the WRC license, and with many years of experience with the MotoGP games, can the marriage between the nine-time champion and Milestone reach the top of the podium? Or will Sébastien Loeb Rally Evo (SLRE) end up stalling on the line?
When you launch the game for the very first time, you are met with a video showcasing the career of the game’s title star. As the sequence closes up, Sébastien Loeb, or a voice-over pretending to be him at least, tells you his next career goal is to find the best rookie driver, and turn them into a rallying superstar. That rookie driver being you of course.
Once you properly start, a screen pops up which allows you to customize your whole driver experience. Here you will get to set up your driver and team, car number, co-driver and even your car’s number plate. Call me original, but I used my own car plates and named my co-driver after my fiancé, though it’s a little weird hearing her speak with a strong male accent. There are no options to change the gender of your driver and co-driver, and everything you customize here can be changed later from the main menu.
Once you’re all set up, you’re given the option to take the tutorial, which I would recommend you do. SLRE does have quite an awkward feel at first and takes a little bit of getting used to. It even felt strange to me at first and I’ve been playing racing games for as long as I can remember. Once the tutorial is complete you have access to your quarry test area. Here you can test drive your cars and get a good feel for the roads ahead. You can come back to the quarry from the main menu at any time by pressing Y or the corresponding button on PlayStation 4. We mostly played the Xbox One version and analyzed the performance on the PlayStation 4 so for simplicity, we’ll just focus on the Xbox One controls. I’m glad the developers implemented this as returning to the quarry is essential throughout the experience.
Moving on. Now you receive your first drive, a 1997 Peugeot 106 Rallye 1.6 car. While not the greatest performer, this car is still good enough to get you through the early events and offers a good idea for the feel of the cars to come. From the main menu you are given six options to choose from. These are Quick Mode, Career, Loeb Experience, Garage, Xbox Live and Options. We’ll discuss them now.
Quick Mode
Quick mode is a little more than what it sounds like, with multiple options that start to show off the depth of content that SLRE has to offer. There’s a lot here. Here you can choose to race in a Rally event, Rallycross, Pikes Peak and Time Trial. Rally gives you multiple options from driving a single rally stage, a full rally event and to start a full championship. This utilizes all eight rally locations included within the game. These are Monte Carlo, Sweden, Mexico, Sanremo, Finland, Australia, Alsace and Wales. Although not officially licensed levels, Milestone has done quite a good job at getting some stages very close to the real location. The similarities are uncanny judging by pictures of the places and their in-game recreations.
Rallycross is a great and welcome addition to the game. This option gives you access to five real life circuits that include Trois-Rivieres, Los Angeles, Loheac, San Luis and Franciacorta. You can race individual tracks or compete in a full championship competing at all locations in races with six cars on track, joker laps included. The world-famous Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is also here and officially licensed. This location was created using a mix of satellite data, video footage and photographs. SLRE’s version of The Race to the Clouds is the most accurate rendition of the mountain road I’ve raced on and that’s saying a lot. It appears to be almost completely faithful to the actual path.
Time Trial is exactly what it sounds like. Take to any and all of the stages and circuits from the game and try to beat the top ten scores on the leaderboards. You can even try to beat Sébastien Loeb’s personal best times though that’s really quite challenging. Now before going in to set my times, I did find what I believe to be a major flaw with posting to the leaderboards. When in a race, as with many other driving games, you can use a rewind feature for correcting any mistakes you make. This is all well and good, but after doing several races and using rewind many times, I noticed my times were still on the leaderboards without any penalty. Not only was there no penalty, but these were the final times I posted in the stage with all my mistakes taken out. While this seems like a generous move by the developers for less experienced players, it takes the challenge out of it.
Career
In a setup very similar to Milestone’s motorcycle game Ride, you begin your career with zero points and are stuck at the bottom of the world rankings…401 place to be precise. As mentioned earlier, you will begin in your new Peugeot 106 under the debut event banner, in the 2WD Rookie class. You now have ten races to complete which consist of a mixture of single stages, small rallies and rallycross events. This will continue throughout your career in 41 individual championships, each consisting of approximately ten races. Some have much more if a full rally is included, some a few less. All require a gold medal first place finish if you want to go for 100% completion. Believe me, it’s very hard and very rewarding at the same time.
Once you complete the 2WD Rookie events, you should now have enough credits to buy a different car. Although all championships are unlocked from the beginning, you are restricted from entering events if you don’t own an eligible car. Nor should you try to do some of the later ones because they’re much harder than what you’re thrown into at the beginning of the game. Credits you earn are used to buy other cars and can also be used to rent from a selection of cars from each of the game’s eleven car classes. Doing this is an expensive process and costs you more in the long run. With this in mind, I would recommend using the cars you have until you can afford the cars you want. Don’t rent because that’s just like throwing your credits away.
As you work your way up the rankings, Loeb events will start to unlock. These are single stages on some of the longest courses in the game and offer more of a challenge than the main bucket list of career events. What’s your reward you might ask? Well, some of the best cars in the game like the 2010 Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X, the 2003 Subaru Impreza and the 2011 Ford Fiesta RS. All of these cars come with a unique orange Loeb event livery. All of these vehicles are amazing and work really well for rally driving.
Rallycross also gets added to your career, with some races being your standard first over the line events. There are also elimination, best sector time and gateway events which test your reaction and precision skills while passing through designated gates. Overall, the career will take you around thirty hours to reach the number one spot, where you get invited by Loeb himself to compete in a special event. You have to play to find out how thrilling that is.
Sébastien Loeb Experience
Sébastien Loeb’s career is showcased in 27 stages. These cover the early days of his career, the record-breaking world championship run and culminate with his world record time set at the Pikes Peak Hill Climb. The man himself is here as well, providing in-depth interviews regarding the different stages of his time behind the wheel. You can skip these if you want, but I feel he gives a great insight into his career which nearly never happened after trashing his team car more than once in his junior days. How he survived all that destruction is still a mystery to me.
The goal of the showcase is to match or best Loeb’s achievements. Some will need you to beat his times while others are as simple as just winning a stage. Each of the seven separate timelines pay out with one of the many Citroens Loeb drove throughout his career as well as the prototype Hill Climb Peugeot from Pikes Peak. Overall, it’s a little short and shouldn’t take more than a few hours to complete. However, for fans of the man himself and WRC purists, this might just be the best part of the game.
The final areas of the game are the Garage, Options and Xbox Live or PlayStation Network sections depending on the console of your choice.
Garage and Options
Your garage is the “everything else” section. In here you can view and select the cars you have won or purchased, modify your active liveries, change any of your team settings which you set at the beginning of the game or revisit the tutorial if you feel the need to get some more practice. Within the options you can fully customize your in-game assists from traction control to having a very useful racing line for newcomers. There is also an option for AI difficulty, the number of rewinds available, as well as all of the usual sound and colour settings. You can also action map your controller buttons from within the game. This becomes handy for people like me who use certain manual gear setups which are not the default SLRE settings. This is another one of the best features of the game and shows that the developers really went above and beyond when they were thinking about the controls.
Online Network
To be honest, the online capabilities feel like a major afterthought to the point that they were only put in because they were needed. You only have two options here which include starting a quickmatch or creating a private lobby. Within the quickmatch option, you can filter between stages and Rallycross, and select the class and track you would like to search for, but nothing else. There’s no hosting public lobbies, no online championships or specific event lobbies. Even searching with the loosest of settings didn’t always get me into a race on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network.
Private lobbies don’t fare much better either and exhibit the same limitations that hinder the public ones. You only get a choice between single stages and Rallycross events once again. I really wish the online portions of this game were more robust and similar to let’s say a game like Forza Motorsport 6.
I do think SLRE is a good game when it works. In fact, it’s a really good game when it works and fans of rallying should definitely take a look. However, for everything I found that I loved, there was nearly always something that made me frown. The game has a fantastic range of cars, almost sixty in total. These cover fourteen manufactures. It also boasts 64 special stages from eight real life locations, a long and enjoyable career, and the Sébastien Loeb Experience showcase. The quickplay options are detailed and fun. Before I forget, being able to take any ride you own straight onto the quarry test area is also a great feature. This all should amount to around sixty plus hours of content for the true rally fan. Rallycross is also very fun. I only wish there were more circuits with longer races, but I like that Milestone also included the Pikes Peak trail. That legendary path makes up for a lot. All of this wraps up into a really good package of solo content for the price you pay.
Now for the downsides, which I’m afraid to say are many. The first thing you notice during your tutorial level are the mediocre graphics. To me, racing games are the standard bearer when it comes to a console’s graphical abilities. With this, I expect all racers on this generation to look clean, tidy and pristine. Sadly, SLRE fails in this area first and foremost. Most cars are only slightly better looking than those in Forza Horizon. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, keep in mind that Forza Horizon was an Xbox 360 release! Even the surroundings, spectators and general environments just don’t quite reach the standard you come to expect this generation. I will say that all of the real life sponsor signage and banners are very detailed and clean which makes them stand out, almost more than anything else in the game.
Frame rate really suffers at times, and on three locations more than others. I encountered this issue on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions so no platform escapes the troubles. Finland, Australia and Mexico all suffer from some serious drops. This at times can make driving perilous and makes you glad that the rewind function is there. I did notice this was more of a problem in areas full of trees or other environmental objects which fill up the screen, but drops and stutters could also occur randomly and for no reason at other locations as well.
In some environments, mainly the morning or evening stages, you really struggle to see where you’re going. Whether this is a problem with your headlights not being on, or just general darkness in some areas, is hard to tell. Now add the wet and muddy conditions where your windscreen gets dirty and you can’t see, or even activate your wipers to clear your vision. This is a huge problem and makes the game unplayable. An option to fix this would be to give the user control of when lights and windscreen wipers are activated. Doing this would add to the experience and remove the biggest frustration for users that use the first-person or dashboard cameras. I can only play racing games using these two cameras and it became an extreme point of vexation for me.
I’ve already mentioned the online and leaderboard situations and up next are the co-driver and in-car issues. For the most part your pace notes are perfect. You can even change how quickly or slowly these are given to you in the options. The issue here is that you’re often not given a caution for what is hiding around the corner. It becomes more frustrating when you’re warned about a tree or a large rock that you can clearly see for yourself, but not for a fence or gate that greets you coming out of a blind turn. You would think this information would be more important than an obvious boulder.
Lastly, handling is a cause for concern. I sometimes like to play racers in the chase cam, and I prefer this to be low down and close to the car, as is the case in all other racing games I play. This is not an option in SLRE. Your camera is very far away and high up. The car itself only takes up around an eighth of the screen. Because of this, the feel of the car in the chase view feels very erratic, unstable, and almost as if you’re floating around at times rather than being on four wheels. Make a small movement too fast and you’re halfway down a mountain or wrapped around a tree. Close chase cams are a much-used standard in racing games and have been for many years now. It’s hard to understand why they’re so far away from your vehicle in SLRE. The in-car, dash and hood cams feel a lot more stable, even to the point where it feels like you’re driving a different car altogether.
Many of these problems are fixable if Milestone is willing to put in the time and effort, and if they do, they will have a very serious and top level rally simulator on their hands. I would compare the launch of SLRE to that of Project CARS on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. It has basic issues that shouldn’t be in a game upon its release. Now nine months on and Project CARS has most of their issues sorted out. However, in the case of SLRE, they don’t have that amount of time to fix this considering Codemasters’ reboot of the Dirt franchise is just around the corner. A lot of patches have already addressed many of my concerns so hopefully they can keep it up.
Now I have to discuss the game’s biggest problem on consoles. The game appears to run below sixty frames per second on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. I would say that the game runs at thirty frames per second all the time but sometimes it appears that it speeds up a bit. I’m not sure what the developers were going for here but this limitation puts the game in a category that gives it a more arcade-like feel. SLRE aims to be a simulation racer and a standard for such games is sixty frames per second. Dirt Rally does it and I’m surprised Milestone didn’t take this into account when bringing it to Xbox One and PlayStation 4. This is by far the most unsettling aspect of the title and will be the main point of concern of many buyers who are serious about simulation racing.
Summary
Overall, Sébastien Loeb Rally Evo is a fun game packed with plenty of events, cars and content to keep even the most hardcore rally fan happy. Despite this, the game has just as many bad areas as good. Poor online choices mixed with the numerous graphical problems that arise means that the title does indeed reach the podium, but misses out on the top step by a mile.
Asher and David is a shared byline ICXM used for 1 article co-authored in 2016 covering game reviews. See the individual contributor profiles for the writers behind these collaborations.