Any other year, Sebastien Loeb Rally Evo may well have been lauded as Milestone's greatest four-wheel game, and one of the finest off-road games in many a year.
It's not, though. There's the throaty rasp of Dirt Rally lingering somewhere in the distance, its console release looming while its PC release continues to accrue admirers of its sublime handling. Even without the threat of one of the greatest off-road games ever made Sébastien Loeb Rally Evo would still come up short. There's a dreariness to the visuals that suggests that, no matter how much time Milestone has, it still will never quite have the budget to truly compete; the frame-rate's erratic, the scenery flat and mundane while even your co-driver sounds bored throughout.
You can have the finest stage selection, the most comprehensive car list, but it counts for naught if your handling is so fundamentally limp. Milestone seems to have been caught between the two extremes offered by its contemporaries, attempting to land somewhere between the generosity of Kylotonn's WRC 5 and the hard edges of Dirt Rally. It's left floundering between the two, though, lost like an errant spectator caught in the halogen glare of a fast-approaching car. Perhaps Sébastien Loeb Rally Evo's biggest crime is its appetite for understeer, anathema to the art of off-road driving and plain murder when you're trying to thread your way through its narrow, unforgiving stages.
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