I don’t get why you’d want to go on the track, though. You’re not just racing, you’re managing a team and sponsors, so there’s plenty to do on and off the track. To be sure, if you can overlook all those issues, there’s a fair amount to do here, at least in career mode. At its absolute worst - which, let’s be honest, is most of the time - even your car will look a little blurry, and it’s not because it’s moving so quickly you can barely see it. Plus, the draw distance is atrocious, so they really do pop in - oftentimes in ways that are quite distracting, since we’re talking about a tree suddenly appearing in the middle-distance out of nowhere. Most of the time, though, the trees all around you pop into being looking like oil paintings done with a very heavy hand, as if they’ve been smudged across the screen by someone who is using globs of paint to make up for the fact they don’t want to draw any details. At the best of times, it runs smoothly enough that you can ignore your surroundings. Seriously, I can’t overstate this enough: WRC 8 looks rough. It may look significantly better with your Switch docked - but I can only assume that, in part because there’s no way a game could look this ugly on a non-handheld console, at least post-PS2.
I should probably admit here that I only played WRC 8 in handheld mode, since that’s the only way I play my Switch.
Mind you, their disappointment at the lousy handling will likely be overshadowed by their disappointment at how hideous this game looks. On the bright side, that’s how I discovered the flaw in this game’s damage detection, but I have to imagine that people playing this game for their love of rally car racing will find themselves more than a little disappointed. Without fail, every time I hit a tight corner, I’d go spinning wildly out of control. Not even braking helps you that much, nor does turning on driving assist. The cars generally seem to have no traction whatsoever, even on the driest tracks, and you’re likely to go spinning off into the abyss any time you take a tight corner. In fact, it often feels like the game is actively trying to make you a bad driver. In my defense, WRC 8’s controls don’t make it easy to be a good driver. Of course, I only learned this because I was a horrifically bad driver, endangering both myself and everyone else on the road - and, since there are those aforementioned spectators, I endangered pretty much everyone in the general vicinity of the road, too. It’s probably an oversight on the part of WRC 8’s developers, but it’s one you can very easily exploit to your advantage. Fail big, in spectacular ways, and the game simply sets you back on the track where you left off, with none of the damage you’d associate with, say, going flying into a lake at 70 MPH. Fail a little bit, in minor, unimpressive ways (or, admittedly, run over spectators), and your car will get docked time and suffer damage. Not only does it look hilarious, I learned that the game also doesn’t quite know what to do in those cases. If you’re about to crash, make sure you send your car hurtling off cliffs or into lakes or tumbling down the side of a mountain. Seriously: don’t just be content with spinning out, or going slightly off the road. If you’re going to play WRC 8 on the Nintendo Switch - and you probably shouldn’t, for reasons I’ll get into shortly - I have one bit of advice: when you fail, fail big.