When your brakes need some attention, you can feel that in the brake trigger. When your tires are getting worn, you can feel the loss of traction in the controller’s vibrations. When your engine is damaged, there’s more tension on the accelerator. When you change gears, you can feel a subtle little kick in the accelerator when your gear changes cause a backfire, that kick is bigger and more noticeable. Again, it’s a neat feature from an “immersion” perspective, but has the far more practical effect of providing that sensory feedback of your car’s behaviour directly to your hands, which then lets you react accordingly. Whether you’re playing with ABS on or off, you can feel the feedback of the brakes in the L2 trigger’s resistance: rapid-fire bursts of tension when ABS kicks on, or the whole trigger locking up when your non-ABS brakes do the same. The adaptive triggers play a similar role, the brake in particular. I’ve never been great at that, but in WRC 9, the haptic feedback makes the reaction seem to almost bypass my brain entirely-my hands feel the surface, and instinctively respond as necessary. These are things that experienced players would be doing anyway, and have been doing since long before PlayStation 5, based solely on visual and aural feedback. It didn’t take long for me to start intuitively reacting to the controller’s vibrations and using those to guide my driving: braking a little earlier because of slippery conditions, letting the extra drift of a gravel road help carry me around a corner, and so on. WRC 9 isn’t unique among PS5 in this regard, but it’s the most practical application of haptic feedback I’ve encountered to date. Driving on a section littered with little rocks and whatnot feels different to driving on a section that’s been freshly swept. Driving on a wet surface feels different to driving on a dry version of the same road. I know next to nothing about rallying, but I know more than I did a few weeks ago, and I owe most of my (moderate) success in WRC 9 to how well it uses the PlayStation 5 controller’s feedback mechanisms.ĭriving surfaces and driving conditions all have their own haptic feedback signatures-driving on snow feels different to driving on gravel, which feels different to driving on tarmac, which feels different to driving to driving on dirt.

I say this in part to set expectations-there are plenty of other reviews out there that’ll give you detailed analysis of how well WRC 9 captures the minutiae of the sport, but this won’t be one of them-but also because I think it underscores one of the things I find most impressive about this game. I should start this WRC 9 FIA World Rally Championship review with a disclaimer: I know next to nothing about the World Rally Championship or rallying in general, and when it comes to racing games, I lean heavily towards the Mario Karts and Burnouts of this world.

Wrc 9 ps5 upgrade