Recent reviews by scube

Feels amazing, better than any rally title in the past 20 years.
Looks great, although performance is not perfect so far.
Sound is quite authentic and leaves a lot of room to fine-tune.
Road surfaces have immense detail, to the point where you must respect bumps when your co-driver especially calls them out.
Large degree of customizability for camera views, motion / eye simulation.
Very good sense of speed.
Suspension feels about as harsh as you can expect for a video game, but again, lots of opportunity to fine-tune as you go along.
(Also runs good on Linux with Proton-GE once you give it some time to cache all the shaders!)

This game is in touch with reality in ways which other rally games have not achieved for decades. Highly recommended already, even one day into Early Access. Brilliant. Merry Christmas.

Needs more players. Netcode is kinda old, don't take online too seriously. Great on LAN. Communities for new players exist.

runs really, really badly. 140fps on lowest possible setting in rally mode, using an rx 6900 xt.
compare to dirt rally 2.0, nearly maxed out, and it has no problem sustaining 240 fps

Trusting game developers with your money because they made one good thing an eternity ago will invariably lead to this. Stop LARPing as angel investors and refund this ♥♥♥♥. Learn your lesson.

EDIT: As of June 2024, this game will receive an in-house kernel-level anti-cheat by EA. DO NOT BUY THIS. Stick to DR2.0 or RBR. DR2.0 is better anyway.

A great example of what it means to rest on your laurels. It's hard to believe that codemasters actually got worse after picking up this huge license, but here we are.

+ Driving feels great, many surfaces are clear improvements in detail and realism of grip over Dirt Rally 2.
+ Audio design is truly excellent, beyond any other racing game or simulator i have ever played.
+ Overall level of detail is an improvement to DR2.

- Horrible performance problems since the beginning. If they get patched out, they return months later. (yes, you heard me right: the stutters are back as of march 11th!)
I used to play this game on Linux, and i thought most of my issues were due to Linux being unsupported. The same issues remained on Windows, sometimes even worse...
- Input latency seems to be loosely tied to frame rate on some hardware. This is a known and ancient problem with UE and many other engines such as Source 2. Combine this with the fact that playing on lower resolutions does not take full advantage of your GPU and you will quickly become frustrated. For example, my RX 6900XT will not go past ~40% usage at 1080p, with uncapped FPS. VSync is off, of course.
- Some of the co-driver calls in certain locations feel as if they were made with only one class of cars in mind and can be wildly inaccurate in other cars. I assume they used Rally1 cars to make all of them. There is no way to edit these.
- Some vehicle classes seem quite imbalanced, with 1 car being clearly better in all areas than the others. NR4/R4 is an extreme example of this. There is also no multi-class racing, neither online nor offline.
- Hardcore damage mode can be made trivial in cases where you would suffer catastrophic damage by simply hitting pause and resetting the car fast enough, allowing you to avoid most of the consequences, most of the time.
- Game is on UE4, despite promising UE5 before launch. Progress is nowhere to be found.
- Game does not have VR support currently. it's said to come out "this spring", which would be seven whole months after the game's launch.
- No meaningful content updates since launch. We have gotten only 1 new location, and only because it was promised at launch. What we didn't know is that all those roads would be fictional. The publisher seems to be setting themselves up for multiple rounds of paid DLC in the future.
- Includes a paid battle pass, which is only cosmetics (SO FAR). Remember, this is EA.
- Pop-in of textures and even solid vegetation. In some locations, there are small trees on the corner apex which only fully appear once you are too close to avoid them.
- Livery editor is very basic and riddled with issues. No official sponsors to be found without using mods. Who knows if these mods will get you banned...
- Dubious level of mod support.
- No Phil Mills.
- Can't speak for other languages, but if you happen to speak a language such as german and want to use a german co-driver, the experience is horrible. He sounds like a voiceover artist for dubbed hollywood movies, not a co-driver.