The tracks themselves are quite enjoyable – a one car race never felt so much fun. The environments feel real and it’s not too often you’ll be able to race up Pikes Peak or an off road raceway in Wisconsin. The co-pilot is very helpful (and not annoying) when giving you a heads up about the next turn. In prior games, you just wanted to shoot your co-pilot because you’d see a hairpin turn on the map and he would tell you this just as you got into the turn (thanks for the help). DiRT does not have this problem; if anything you are told too early about what’s coming up. The game provides a nice balance of simulation and arcade experience and if you feel it’s not balanced enough, you can adjust the difficulty level accordingly.

The online play is rather misleading: the game supports a 100 player game. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But there’s a problem: although up to 100 players can be on the same race at the same time, it’s not like you’re actually seeing those other 99 people race. Each gamer is racing individually – which is true to rally racing but really isn’t like you’re racing 100 people at the same time – it feels more like a leaderboard type of game where you check to see who has the best time.

DiRT is a great game to show off your Xbox 360’s graphical capabilities and is a fun and addictive racing game with a high amount of replay value. It will definitely take you some time to complete the single player game and with the variety of cars and the ‘liveries” (i.e. same model car but designed differently exterior wise), you’ll be playing it for a while.