Colin McRae: DiRT Review

Released a few weeks ago Colin McRae: DiRT is another great addition to the xbox 360's fine repertoire of top class racing games. Whereas the majority of racing games released are predominantly circuit or road based, DiRT as you may gather from the title is more concerned with the grittier and dirtier side of off-road racing.

Colin McRae titles of yesteryear were purely associated with Rally driving, but just like the namesake has digressed in the latter stages of his career, the developers, Codemasters, have also branched out and the game now features a whole host of off-road styles with a plethora of vehicles to make the game more appealing to the mass market. It certainly contains lots of variety and one minute you could be tearing down a narrow track competing in a traditional rally stage and the next you could be driving in a CORR (Championship Off-Road Racing) event, wheel to wheel with other competitors as you bounce around a muddy circuit.

There are plenty of modes available in DiRT. The main mode, Career, features a pyramid of eleven tiers with the bottom tier consisting of eleven stages, the next tier 10 stages and so on until you reach the final stage on the last tier. When selecting a stage you can choose from one of five difficulties starting from the easiest "Rookie" and moving up to "Pro" class. The level of difficulty you choose directly effects not only the AI opposition skill but also the level of mechanical damage you can sustain, whether terminal damage is switched on or off and importantly the amount of money you can win from placing 1st to 3rd. In a nice change to the financial rewards once you score a podium position the money that will be offered for repeating the race at the same difficulty significantly decreases, thus encouraging you to step up to the next difficulty level.

Money gained through the career mode can be used to purchase new vehicles and liveries. With 46 vehicles and 182 liveries in total there's something to please everyone from rally cars like the "Suzuki Swift 1600" and "Subaru Impreza 06 WRX", to buggies like the "Ickler Jimco" and big rigs such as the "Freightliner Century Class S/T". All the vehicles handle very differently to one another and the player has to adjust to not only the vehicle but to the track surface, whether it is tarmac, mud, or gravel the differences are very noticeable and the physics engine does a fine job in this department.

Career race events are nicely varied and as-well as covering traditional rally stages and crossover events also feature CORR circuit racing, hill climbs and rally raid events. Once an event has been selected there are a number of additional options available and although you can jump straight into the race you could also practice an event, change your vehicles set-up, repair damage or get verbal feedback on the stage from your co-drivers recce.

As with Forza this game features a good balance between realism and accessibility. For those that want to glean every bit of performance from a vehicle then there are plenty of tuning settings that can be changed for a vehicle such as the suspension, brakes, differential or the downforce. Similarly tuning is not a necessity and a player can quite happily stick to playing the game without ever feeling the need to mess around with the setup.

As well as Career mode there are a couple of additional single player modes available. Championship is the more traditional rally game setup, and the "National" event within this allows you to compete in a single rally event consisting of up to seven individual stages. The "European", "International" and "Global" championship events bulk up the championship mode by combining a number of single rally events into individual tournaments. Rally World finishes off the single player modes and allows you to choose a single race, event or time trial for any of the career events you've unlocked thus far.

The environmental graphics for this game are truly excellent, very realistic with plenty of variety and locations such as the green hills and windy roads of the UK to dusty outback trails across Australia. You get a real thrill as you hurtle down dirt tracks narrowly missing rocks and trees as you slide around tight hairpin bends. The vehicles themselves are all beautifully modelled featuring a good damage system that becomes more realistic on the harder difficulties.




Whereas I was a bit disappointed with the camera views on offer with Forza I cannot fault the number available in DiRT. There are six in total and apart from the usual bumper, bonnet and external chase views there are a couple of cockpit views that really immerse you in the action. The replay camera also deserves a mention with great slow-mo, rewind, and fast-forward actions and I've found myself using it on many occasions to watch the action once a race has ended.

So what are the negatives? Well, there are some minor points. The game features fairly long loading times and although an attempt has been made to disguise this fact with some snazzy statistics you do eventually get bored of knowing how many times you've failed to finish or the amount of time you've spent on two wheels. And although on the whole the cockpit views are excellent, I did find that I had to switch to a chase view when using the "Chevrolet Siverado" as one of the front reinforcement bars badly obscures the view. It may be accurate, but in terms of playability it just gets in the way.

To summarise this is another fantastic racing game, beautifully modelled with a lot of variety and if you're looking for an alternative to Forza then I would highly recommend it.