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The first DiRT game did nothing for me but then again I didn’t give it a hell of a lot of time, for as soon as the devs put me in a giant ute and told me to drive around in that piece of crap, I instantly rejected it.

This time however, I skipped straight past the waste of time Raid and Land Rush events (which are predominantly hosted on American soil) and went straight to Croatia to give my new Evo IX a whirl with a Scottish bloke (the co-driver) telling me every single corner that I’m “lucky” because I didn’t completely wrap my car around that pole.

I’ll tell you now, no rally game to date has compared to how immersive this one is. I love rally games because they’re damned hard to get good at and most of my racing game expertise is done on tarmac so when, suddenly, you have shin-deep dirt sticking to your tires as you whistle around a hairpin at 80km/h, you simply shit your pants with excitement.

ROADS ARE FOR PUSSIES!

Seriously, this game doesn’t even penalise you if you want to take a slight detour and try leap over a hill…which typically winds up breaking your car.

Anyway, as is stated on Wikipedia: The game includes six different event types: Rally, Rallycross, Trailblazer, Gatecrasher, Land Rush and Raid.

Rally is obviously your standard whip through the hills with a co-driver screaming in your ear sort of race.
Rallycross is basically motorcross…small tracks with tight corners and tricky obstacles that you zoom around.
Trailblazer(by far my favourite) basically takes the co-driver out, gives you a faster car and sends you on your way on a big ass open track…the feeling is intense when you’re muscling along at 250km/h and you see a tight corner but you cant brake now…so you just throw yourself into it and hope for the best.
Gatecrasher is a time trial system on rally tracks where you hit “blocks” (presumably foam?) to gain more time.
Land Rush is big American Ute and Truck racing on Rallycross-esque tracks, its impossible to control and crap.
Raid is the same thing but on a rally track with shortcuts everywhere.

Anyway, as with any game you race for fame which gives you new cars and new tracks to race. Its pretty straight forward, the more you race the more you level, the better tracks you can race etc.

I wasn’t planning on blogging about this game until I was a lot further in, basically I set myself up to level asap so I could race the 3 xGames events and all the World Tours. But then I unlocked a special event. 3 Races in an old Ford as a tribute to Colin McRae…other participants included Valentino Rossi, David Coulthard, Jimmy McRae and Travis Pastrana…names anyone that knows a thing about racing will know.

And then I won it (naturally)…and it stopped all game play and played a 5 minute biography of Colin McRae’s life as a tribute to his death in 2007…and it made the entire game worth getting. I love Rally and I love Rally games, but I didn’t expect for a game made about a Scotsman to suddenly thrust me into the world of Rally and the untimely passing of Colin McRae…it was outstanding and honestly I don’t know if getting all the achievements for the game even matter now, that was the best part of the game. In my mind I’ve won it now and its finished.

But I’m still gonna race on only because Budda challenged me…and Ima kick his ass.

As far as game play goes, its very hard to get used too…if you’re just looking for a casual race game, go play GRID. Actually on that note, this game is very much based on the GRID engine…you still have the timetravel system which works EXACTLY the same as GRID…so for GRID fans like me…you’ll be just at home.
This game can be played with standard cars with standard settings…but for me I like to race specific cars with specific settings on specific courses. Rallycross always has me driving my Subaru STI whereas Trailblazer has me kitted out in either my Evo IX or my Evo X depending on whether or not I require speed or control. On top of that you can set settings on your car before every race…i.e. you can change suspension settings, gear settings, ride height settings, brake settings etc. It’s simple once you get used to it (as there’s only 5 possible settings for each piece on your car) but it can be a wee bit confusing for casual racers.

Anyway, here’s a clip of some bloke racing pretty a pretty good race through Morocco on Trailblazer mode:

You’ll hear a guy near the end of the race say: “I can’t believe this! I’m out!”. When you play this game you will hear the bots talking a lot, each time you do a good run they’ll compliment you…but man they get angry when you hit their cars. No matter what you do, it will always be your fault when you collide…ALWAYS.

Wanker bots.

I’ll leave it there methinks, I highly recommend this game to any Car enthusiast or anyone wanting to have a decent racing game to fill in time.

Rating: 9/10. Far better than its predecessor and aside from some silly game modes (Gatecrasher, Raid and LandRush) this game hits all the right notes.

Also I’m well aware they threw those above 3 listed game modes in to satisfy everyones racing tastes…but seriously it makes a serious racing game seem too comical.