If the WRC and DiRT series could be compared to Gran Turismo and Forza, then Sebastien Loeb Rally Evo could be compared to Driving Emotion Type-S: a one-off game from SquareEnix (back then just SquareSoft) that may have looked decent given the initial reviews, but once you play it the disaster that it truly is becomes apparent. It can't hold it's own against the bigger titles and is left on the shelves as a forgotten regrettable purchase. Developer Milestone has been around since the 90s and have worked on the WRC and MotoGP games so they have some knowledge when it comes to sim racing and it's surprising to see just how mediocre Rally Evo really is, it seems to have hit a bump and crashed headfirst into some trees.
The first and immediate problem are the physics that seem to toe the line between reality and arcade: it's hard to understand just how they work and even when you think you do, the game seems to change with each and every car. RWD cars slide everywhere when braking while 4WD cars seem to lose the ability to steer altogether. It doesn't play well when you have to remember how each car handles for all the different races. The variety of race types is commendable but some of them are absolutely useless in the terms of this being a rally game. The career mode feels more like an arcade mode by jumping from event to event and having the Loeb Experience only take you through his career-defining moments. All the while there are no consequences for damage so you don't have to worry about paying for mistakes, use those credits to buy new cars and keep going. It all adds up to a game with $30 worth of quality and content that retailed for $60 at launch.
Each stage and locale are detailed to be as realistic as possible but there's no pizzazz behind it, all the colors feel muted. In spite of that, the light rays, reflections, and shadows are excellently placed. I use a screenshot I took as a Facebook banner and one of my relatives thought it was a real picture. Each car sounds unique and the backfire from the more powerful ones are loud. Pacenotes seem to go an extra mile in the wrong direction compared to other games and the co-driver is just an absolute robot and even counting down at the start of a race you can hear him say "Go?" Several times there are audio clips of Sebastien Loeb, only it's not really him. Loeb is French and has an accent, the man in the recording is purely American. At one point the pacenotes switched to a completely different language.
Every once in a while a game comes along that has some competence: it "works well" but for some unexplained reason all of it comes together in a big mess of slush that gets pushed to the side in favor of a more well-established series of games. For those who don't know, Sebastien Loeb currently has the most victories in the WRC: 77 wins according to the website (for comparison, McRae only has 25), so a man of such importance should have had a better game than this. But if I'm being honest, I'd like to see another developer take over this title and try something new.