For the past few months, Codemasters has had us ogling at some of the most impressively realistic screenshots of any racing game ever. Needless to say, we couldn't bloody wait for Colin McRae DiRT.
As huge fans of the series, we had a lot to look forward to. Not only does this game bring the best rally sim up to speed, squeezing every last megabit of juice out of the processors of the current-gen hardware, but it also expands on the series to an epic scale, adding more vehicle types than Jeremy Clarkson has even heard of.
Yet, look up at the top of the page. 8.4. Sure, it's a good score, but it's not the 9 plus we were hoping for. The cold hard truth is that, while what this game does it does well, it just doesn't feel like a Colin McRae game. The radical changes in handling, presentation and the overall nature of the game make this feel more like a new-gen V-Rally than a Colin McRae sequel.
Wait though - we don't want to put you off. Like we said, this game does what it does to a very high standard and, whether or not it feels like traditional Colin McRae, there's dozens of hours of top-quality racing to be had here, and unparalleled levels of variety.
The big thing about DiRT is that it's no-longer just about the World Rally Championship. The standard rally cars of previous games have been joined by buggies, trucks, dirty great big rigs and other mud-churning gas guzzlers to make one big off-road orgy of a game.
The courses are equally as varied. You've got straight point-to-point rally sprints, cross-over special stages, lap racetracks, and these contain their own variants too, so a lap race in a rally car tends to be on gravel and tarmac, whereas buggy races are full of hills. The point-to-point races range from outback Australian sprints, to tarmac-covered streets in Japan, to hill-climb events in the US.
This variety keeps you entertained throughout the huge single-player Career mode, which takes the form of a pyramid of race events. You start at the bottom and can earn a maximum of ten points for winning each event, which can consist of between one and six races.
The more points you accumulate, the more events you unlock until you reach the top. You'll unlock the huge variety of vehicles here too, by buying them with money you earn for winning.
Races and cars that you unlock in the Career mode become usable in the Championship mode, which throws up a massive selection of national, European and international tournaments to race. Again, this is where the variety in cars and races really shines through.
However, the selection of massively contrasting vehicles brings with it both good and bad points. On the good side, you'll leap into a traditional rally car, like a Subaru Impreza, and you'll have a great time blasting around the gravel tracks.
The buggy races are awesome fun too, throwing you into multi-vehicle races on tracks that are typically full of ridiculously fast jumps. For those races in the game, we absolutely adore it.
But then you have the big rig races. Tell us, after you've been blistering through narrow town streets at 90+ mph in a 4WD rally beast, who the hell wants to then clamber into a hefty, oaf-like big rig and haul its big metal arse around a course at what feels like a granny-strolling-to-the-offy pace? They handle like shopping trolleys too. Boring.
We don't like the smaller, front-wheel-drive cars either. The complete opposite of the big rigs, they feel way too light, with spontaneous and often erratic handling that you literally have to fight with to keep on the road. Remember the weightless cars in the original V-Rally on PlayStation? That's what they feel like.
The overall handling of DiRT is one of the main reasons we say this is not the Colin McRae game fans will have wanted. It may have some new built-from-the-ground-up, ultra-next-gen physics system, and that does make for some of the most impressive car damage in any racing game, but the handling itself feels too arcadey for a Colin game.
In fact, the game is a strange mix between realistic and arcade. On the menu side of things, you have all sorts of dials and settings you can play with to tweak the performance of the car. In that area, it's like a Gran Turismo or F1 game. You can adjust camber, suspension, gear ratios, and all sorts of other parts of the car you don't understand (although, giving credit where it's due, it has spoken explanations for each part).
But then you get down to the important bit - the driving - and it's all arcadey. It's almost like the game doesn't know what it wants to be: an arcade game or a simulation. But the bottom line is this doesn't FEEL like a simulator.
The cars don't have enough feeling of weight. Even the smallest of cars, the Clio, for example, are 1000kg-pieces of metal (we Googled it). Yet, even when skimming over loose gravel at 100mph, we never felt like we had to be cautious about braking points - they stop almost instantly and turn like they're on rails - which, like we said before, feels too responsive and that's often what puts you into walls.
The amazing thing about previous Colin games was how good it felt to neatly slide your car around every corner, and the sound of the tyres scuffing along added to the visceral pleasure. In DiRT, those satisfying side-sweeping turns are occasional, because the cars feel so light and so agile that you don't have the weight to put them sideways around every bend and you end up driving them in much more of a straight line than traditional Colin fans will be used to.
Yet, despite our obvious disappointment on that side, the game has so many positives it almost completely makes up for it. The game is full of cool little touches. The menu presentation, with all its swooping boxes and flashy effects, is amazing. The online integration is great - after EVERY race you're shown an online leaderboard of the fastest times on that course, even when playing in single-player.
The load times are horrible, but to make up for that the game uses this time to brief on more stats - longest jump, longest slide, average race speed (over all the races you've ever raced!), longest distance without crashing... the impressive list goes on.
There's online racing in there too. It's not huge - ranked and unranked rally races are about the extent of the options, but that's alright.
So, in the end, you just have to accept the new Colin McRae for what it is. It might be arcade-like, and we hate the annoying, Tony Hawk-style American voice-over man that does nothing but bleat over-enthusiastic bollocks like "Yeah, we won because we were the fastest!" (we miss Nicky Grist), but despite the culture change, this is a great racing game.
It's an arcade-style rally game with immense variety in cars and courses, it looks incredible (although still has some choppy frame rate dips) and has the most amazing crash physics. Combine the huge single-player career with the online racing and there's loads of racing pleasure to be had.
I played the PC demo and i hated that american dude, they should have put a mini game in where you could slice him up or something and as a bonus his annoyingness would no longer be present in the game
It's not a bad game, but I must admit the handling is very robotic. Also I don't think the particle effects look quite as good as the trailers lead us to believe, but things on a small preview screen tend to look better than on a large TV.
The big downer... Why the heck do we have to have a redneck american co-driver? The guy is a moron, making childish comments like "C'mon lets show them how to do this" or "Man can't wait to get my hands on that trophy". Why couldn't we have had a choice of co-driver voices?
LOL yeah that's what I think everytime he opens his mouth as well
One thing I've just noticed that's really bugging me is the fact that when you drive through a forest when in "helmet cam" view you can't see any trees in the rear view mirror.... shoddy!
Have to say i agree with every single point in the review, it's spot on.
I still like the game, but the light handling and terrible American voice-over really puts a downer on the game.
I think if they slowed the game down by 20% and decreased the steering sens. it will be good. Maybe the PC version can get a mod made for it to do this.
how dare they compare it unfavourably to V-Rally. Vrally, with its all insanely aggressive AI drivers and lovely courses blew colin mcrae out of the water back in the day.
Another downer on the game is the framerate. It's okay in the rally stages, but in rally raid, motor cross and CORR it gets alarmingly low.
This sort of thing I can accept on my PC which isn't the fastest machine in the world, but on consoles the games are supposed to be designed specifically for the spec of the machine and slowdowns are meant to be bug tested out before a games release. I think the fact that there are sub 20fps frame rates in CMirt is a good example of how lazy programmers are these days.
Lots of games on PC get released in a badly unoptimised state and if you complain about it you're told to "Upgrade your machine because it's not fast enough", which is an excuse I've always found to be a bit lame. And now we're starting to see bad frame rates on consoles, so how are you supposed to take that apart and shove some more RAM/new Graphics card in it?
The handling's just as dodgy in the PC version, and miles away from the handling in Colin McRae '04 and Colin McRae 2005, both of which I've been playing rather a lot of in anticipation. The official forums over here are rife with people talking and complaining about the iffy handling, as well as frame rate issues.
I hate races with the light FWD cars, as they careen all over the track, are a bastard to straighten up, and can slam from 100+mph down to under 20mph in about a second and a half on corners, which is just ridiculous.
Add on top of that the infamous Starforce copy protection drivers on the PC version, as well as the Launch Day patch, and I'm not that impressed really. It's not a McRae game; it feels more like TOCA Race Driver or something.
I mean, it looks fantastic, but that's not the important thing about a game. It's how well it plays, and this I'm afraid pales compared to CMR'04 and CMR2005. I shan't be uninstalling either of them for a while yet.
I cancelled my pre order becos theres a deal on gamestation.co.uk that if you buy ne other 360 game u get dirt for Ł15 so u cn get forza and dirt for Ł50
LOL yeah that's what I think everytime he opens his mouth as well
One thing I've just noticed that's really bugging me is the fact that when you drive through a forest when in "helmet cam" view you can't see any trees in the rear view mirror.... shoddy!
I dunno about the xbox version, but the PC has the option to enable reflections on the mirrors
Im getting decent enough performance with the game on my PC, 30-35FPS which is fine for a racer, i can have all the settings high, 2xAA, no crowds, no motion blur and have to use a crap resolution i.e. same as the xbox's. It looks great though and plays well. Its highly dependent on the GPU, and im getting a nice 8800GTX next month anyway Im enjoying it, the handling is totally stupid though, you can go from full speed to 0 in under a second, feels like some antigravity spacesip
I dunno about the xbox version, but the PC has the option to enable reflections on the mirrors
The reflections are on in the xbox 360 version. You can see the road behind you, but when you drive through a forest and you can see trees in your front view if you look in the rear view mirror it looks like you're driving through a desert, because you see no trees. It's obviously been done to improve the frame rate, but why couldn't they have just added the ability to turn off the rear view mirror instead?
I dunno about the xbox version, but the PC has the option to enable reflections on the mirrors
The reflections are on in the xbox 360 version. You can see the road behind you, but when you drive through a forest and you can see trees in your front view if you look in the rear view mirror it looks like you're driving through a desert, because you see no trees. It's obviously been done to improve the frame rate, but why couldn't they have just added the ability to turn off the rear view mirror instead?
I havnt checked that on the PC version, but it does have ultra settings on the PC( if you have an 8800 card ), i cant access them though with my current gfx card, but id say youll see all the reflections on the PC. It does sound a bit silly alright, but again if thats the only issue...
You can put a name to the American VO guy - its Travis Pastrana. Apparently he's the new kid on the block in WRC. Just thought I'd give you a name so you could vent at the real guy and hate him even more!
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For the past few months, Codemasters has had us ogling at some of the most impressively realistic screenshots of any racing game ever. Needless to say, we couldn't bloody wait for Colin McRae DiRT.
Huge selection of races
irt is a good example of how lazy programmers are these days.
