The next game has been completed for the year. I felt in the mood for some rallying and so I grabbed Colin McRae DiRT off my shelf with the intentions of running a few races and then getting bored. Two days later and I had completed it, which says quite a lot about my mood and the game.
I am a big fan of driving games, in fact I think I play most of them, it’s just that I don’t finish very many. DiRT was put to one side for reasons that I really can’t remember, but I really suspect the problem was that I got in in June 2007. The other big games I got that month were Overlord (not completed yet) and Forza 2, which I played to death and well and truly completed. This makes DiRT a game I overlooked because of bad timing and so is a perfect example of why I’m doing this. In America it was just called DiRT, but we got the last remnants of the Colin McRae series of games technically linked through this new franchise.
DiRT is a game without much of a linking narrative. You have a career mode that has you working up a pyramid of events where each higher level has one less event than the last tier. There are eleven events in the first tier and eleven tiers so I make that 66 events in career mode, of which many are multi stage events. You earn cash for cars (which you will need) and new liveries (which you don’t) for them and each win gives you more points that unlock new events. It’s pretty standard stuff for a racing game.
This game marked the start of a new era for Codemasters racers. The engine has gone on to power every racing game they make and they all share a common look and feel. As there is now a law saying that all racing games must be compared to Gran Turismo 5 I shall do so, and since it does include a rally element it’s not an unfair comparison. Although graphically inferior to GT5 due to both age and the quality of that title the game in many ways actually looks better. From simple things like the trees being better to more mundane aspects like the menus being graphically interesting to a level that contrasts GT5s almost clinical presentation in places. The game really stacks up well to GT5 and it certainly gives a lot more attention to rallying than GT5 does.
The game features a mix of event types, from tradition stages through misty German forests to yellowy orange deserts. There are other events such as track based spectator racing and hill climbing which mix things up but they all have the same general goal: be faster than everybody else.
Rating the car handling is a tricky one as I’ve never thrown an Impreza though the woods at 100mph. Not for lack of enthusiasm it should be noted, but my friend who actually had one back in the 90s deemed that a bad idea. When I think back about the ultimate fate of that car and how far into the field it ended up I think she may have had a point. Because of this I can only say that it seems good to me. It’s certainly not perfect and not near to the feel of Gran Turismo 5, but it’s respectable and sliding around hairpins feels satisfying.
Interestingly as the first in a (rebooted) series I can actually recommend it over the sequel as they went on a different direction with that title. The third game will be out soon and is going back more towards the feel of the first game and so until then it has to be the recommended rally game if you prefer more traditional rallying rather than the more Americanized focus in the second game. Even after a few years the game still feels fun, looks good and plays really well.
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