Watch Brother Rally Round 7 Live On 22 June 2012

Italian racing specialist developer Milestone does not have the excellent reputation of others in its field (most notably Codemasters, whose sleekly good-looking, knowledgeable yet exciting approach to licensed racing kept F1 2010 at the top of the UK charts for weeks), but last year's WRC was a passionately crafted rally game, even if it was rather dry and unashamedly drab. It could be proud of its fastidious attention to detail and tightly realistic vehicle handling, if not its good looks.

For fans of the sport, there was a lot to love, but nobody would deny that there was room for improvement - not least Davide Latina of Black Bean, the game's publisher. "WRC was pretty good, the driving model was absolutely fine, but the general graphical standard was generating criticism, both in the media and WRC followers and racing game fans. So we decided to improve the game dramatically in that area," he says. "70% of our effort has gone into improving the graphics."

The improvement is immediately noticeable. Dropped straight into one of the game's new Super Special stages (a one-on-one rally event in a Portugese arena), the lighting, car models and surrounding environments have been brought up to a much more professional standard. Outdoors, in a German Special event, the improvement is even more radical – the natural sunlight, tree detail and general attractiveness of the surroundings are all dramatically improved. It's starting to look the part – something that's more and more important for a modern racer, especially one that's in the same space as Dirt 3.

WRC straddles the Need for Speed: Shift ground between straight-up arcade and Forza-style simulation. It's a realistic racer, but a more approachable one than its predecessor. "A realistic game can't be too frustrating, too hard to play; it can't be too close to simulation," Davide asserts. The revamped Career mode is at once less forbidding and more fully-featured, with a team management feature that lets you hire new mechanics, engineers, drivers and co-drivers, and an event calendar that sticks less rigidly to the real-life schedule. A WRC Driving School should ease the pain considerably for novice drivers, too.

In terms of how the cars look and handle, the realism hasn't been toned down excessively. As a novice driver behind the wheel of a powerful car you'll still have to endure your co-drivers admonishments and yelps of pain as you smack into barriers and fluff corners, but you can get the hang of things quickly, and once you bed into the game's physics and master an aggressive approach to cornering, the handling is tight and rewarding.

Relenting, perhaps, to pressure from elsewhere in the genre, Milestone has implemented a five-second rewind feature, accessible through the Y button. It allows you to erase your mistakes and wind back time to attempt a corner again, though we assume it won't be permissible in all game modes.

It's clear from Milestone's attitude to this follow-up that the developer has listened to fans' criticisms; a lot of necessary attention is being lavished upon how the game looks, whereas the satisfying driving model is largely unchanged. It's set for October 2011.