Anyone who has played racing games is familiar with the Colin McRae racing series which debuted on the PC many years ago and was also well received on the original Xbox, PS2 and even the N-Gage. Unfortunately, aside from having his name on the box, not many people knew that name, and Codemasters decided to drop the name from the box for this year’s fantastic rally racer called “DiRT”.
(However, in some of the literature provided the game is called “Colin McRae DiRT”, but for our purposes we’re just going to call it DiRT (with the small i), unless they change the name between now and the end of the review.)
Rally racing is big in Europe and has just started to make some strides here in America, but you can only do so much with a game that is simply point to point, single car racing. Although previous games in the series had in fact done this pretty well, DiRT tries to expand by including other off road events, rally raid competitions and hill climb competitions.
When you first start the game, you are guided through what you need to do by a rather reassuring unnamed voice. He tells you what events to pick, and how to play the game. Unlike most other tutorials that come across as annoying, this guy is actually very helpful, because the number of events in career mode is astounding. The definition for astounding in this review is 66 events covering all of the different types of races mentioned above. The events are displayed as sort of a $20,000 Pyramid: you start at the bottom of the pyramid and as you earn points you unlock more events and move up the pyramid until you’ve completed them all.
If there’s anything to complain about before you get to the game it’s that at the very beginning you are limited to the choices of cars you can purchase, but as you earn money you can upgrade and replay the races to earn all the points necessary to move up in single player. Also, the load times between racers, when you time them, seem to take a while; however this is mitigated by the unique way the game presents your career stats. As the game loads, you see your best time, the number of victories you have, the prize money you’ve racked up, etc. It’s a real clever way of keeping you interested in the game when usually you’re just given a bland “loading” screen.
The graphics are just plain sweet. Quite simply, it’s the best looking racing game on the 360 and that’s saying something with the high caliber of games on the system like Test Drive Unlimited, Forza, as well as the Need For Speed and Burnout series. The game is the first one to use Codemasters “Neon” engine and definitely won’t be the last. Everything looks good and is in play while in game. The dirt spinning from the tires looks great; the vehicles look incredible. In previous rally racing games, if you tried to deviate off the path, you might hit an invisible wall or even worse collided with an object that caused considerable damage to you but nothing really happened to the object you collided with. Not so in Dirt, sorry, DiRT– if you hit a fence, the fence will take just as much damage as your vehicle. While of course, crashing into everything is not condoned in a game like this, it’s still visually impressive.
The car physics themselves are a mixed bag. While it’s understandable that when on dirt or any sort of soft surface your vehicle it probably going to slide with a slight movement of the wheel, DiRT seems to be EXTREMELY sensitive to any vehicle movements. Just a slight turn of the force feedback wheel was enough to spinout. While there are car settings that can be adjusted, steering feels too soft with the Microsoft Force Feedback Wheel. The good news is that the wheel does provide true force feedback so taking a turn at a high rate of speed requires a bit more effort with the wheel than it does with the regular Xbox controller. The bad news is that the wheel can be much less forgiving when driving, so much so that you may want to stick with the controller until you are very familiar with the tracks.
