DiRT Reviews

Colin McRae DiRT

Colin McRae DiRT is a no holds barred slice of racing action. The game encompasses a wide range of disciplines from your standard WRC style rallying, to 'point to point' races in trucks and everything in between.

Of course a racing game's key mechanic is that of the handling of the cars. Whilst the game is generally developed to host a more 'arcadey' feel of handling to the cars, it's by no means an over simplified approach that Codemasters have taken here.

The rally cars feel suitably light and responsive, whilst certain classes of rally car (such as RWD cars) have their own character and will take a different approach in order to master the art of speeding through a stage in a time respectable enough to take a high points finish.

In other events trucks have a decidedly heavier feel and will fight your efforts to guide them around the tracks, whilst the dune buggies fly around corners on two wheels.

All of this means that you'll have to spend time learning the curves of each class in order to remain competitive, and will also have to learn the art of proper accelerator/brake control (and appropriate gearing technique should you be the kind of gamer who, like me, opts for the manual gears setting).

The graphics look great indeed, but the age of the game perhaps shows though slightly more now against the likes of Forza 3 as the game can occasionally feature some anti-aliasing and slight 'roughness' to the picture. This is only noticeable if you're really looking for it though and the game still looks top notch.

The sounds are brilliant and really capture the atmosphere of high octane motor racing. The pace notes are well recorded and are varied enough to be able to sound smooth and not at all disjointed which is nothing less than you'd expect from a next generation game on a next generation console from a developer like Codemasters.

However, the pace notes are sometimes issued too sluggishly and you might find yourself driving 'blind' for a corner or two as your co-driver bands around advice for a corner you drove far too quickly (or slowly) through three turns back.

I also have a small issue with the Americanisation of the game. Gone are the days of Nicky Grist and now we have a extroverted American in his place. As an example of how insufferable he can sometimes be, if you win a rally he may be heard to say "First place. Me likey". That's right, that's not a typo, he actually will say "Me likey".

This in addition to suffering a voice over guy guide you through you career who will dish out endless rewards of "Good job dude", "You were smokin'" and other such dull, sterile and frankly annoying 'compliments'.

The career mode is structured in a tier system, or rather a giant pyramid with fewer and harder events as you move ever closer to the final event to prove your worth. Tracks become harder, cars faster and the difficulty greater as you progress. Completing a stage awards you points (depending on your finish position) which accumulate to unlocking the next tier after a set number of points have been won.

You may find as you progress through the game to the higher levels on the hardest difficulty that you will be thundering round tracks in times several dozen seconds quicker than your nearest rival which removes the element of tension as you build up a comfortable lead throughout a championship as you know you can afford to put several wheels wrong throughout the duration of a rally.

On the flip side, you may occasionally come across an event which, no matter how you drive, or how you set your car up, you will always be minutely off the pace. This is where you will need to drive the track again, again, again and again to learn the optimum route and gearings through corners to shave those seconds off. This appeals to the hardcore gamer, but may put off the more casual gamer.

All in all the game kept me coming back for more and more until I'd achieved my full 1000/1000 Gamerscore, so that has to count for something. As racing titles go on the Xbox 360, this is something of an Xbox Classic and well worth picking up on the cheap as is easily possible now.

What a fantastic game! Way to go codemasters! Unfortunately it will probably be the last game we will see with the Colin McRae name attached to it. The game was release the summer before his untimely death towards the end of 2007. I'm gonna miss racing him. But as for the game goes it is by far the best off road rally style racing game out there. Screw Gran Turismo 4's piddly section of dirt tracks, this game is the real deal with all the real courses and any car or truck you can think of racing on them. Including Semi's, that's right, I said Semi Truck Off Road Racing, what could be more fun than that. The graphics and game control are top notch and no joke, you can easily mangle and destroy your car when the difficulty is on anything above rookie, but that's just the fun of the game. So driving skill and experience is a plus for playing this game and it's a ton of fun when you get the hang of it, I highly recommend this game to any racing fan. I myself just finished beating the career mode and am moving onto the championships and online play (hope there are still people playing ). So my hat's off to Colin and to the game, I hope to see more like this from codemasters!

This is what I have been waiting for in a racing game in a long time. Every other developer should take note of codemasters DiRT. It is what we as a gaming community want.

First and foremost you can set the difficulty level to your skill level. I Really liked that you could see how much damage your vehicle recieved so far in the race.

The rally races were great, I love how you have to race two legs before you get a chance to repair. It really forces you to make some decisions on what is important to you. (suggestion ALWAYS clean your car first, it lowers the time it takes to do other repairs and almost always lets you get one more thing in.)

Online was playable. I say this only because it would be very cool if you had 30 second start intervals on the races so that you could overtake opponents and be overtaken. This takes nothing away from the game as is. The format they use is very understanding as it really is a timed event.

Graphics were great. the races were memorable. Pikes peak hill climb full is STILL my favorite. The only reason i got rid of this game on Goozex (my tag is elronin) is becasue i requested the sequal and cannot wait to get it.

GET THIS GAME!! GET THIS GAME! GET THIS GAME!

To codemasters i give

Colin McRae: DiRT is the first game in the DiRT series, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that this is a poorer game than the others.

The new series name shows that it has moved away from the classic McRae games on the last generation of consoles, and into other types of off-road motorsport. Of course, there is still a number of straight-up rallies, but now there are also hill climb races, rallycross, truck races and more.

Before I talk about the details though, I’ll go through the handling – surely the most important part of any racing game. The handling is more arcadey than realistic, but it feels perfect for the type of game it is aiming to be. It is easy to pick up and hard to master, like all good games should be and you can tell the difference between each car or truck.

When you load the game, you will notice the streamlined, easy to navigate menus, complete with voiceover. Thankfully, the use of the voiceover is limited and so it does not become annoying.

In terms of modes, there are four. There is the Career Mode, where you complete a variety of events to unlock more, working your way up from novice driver to the elite tracks and races, competing against the very best. Second is the Championship mode, which is where you’ll get most of your normal rallying. There are three championships to take part in, two of 3 rallies and one of 6 rallies. Each rally contains between 5 and 7 stages, including one rally stage, depending on the settings. The final offline mode is essentially a ‘free play’ mode, where you can set the race up as you wish and complete it. Finally, there is an average online mode. It can be quite hard now to find a game, but usually there are some lobbies set up for you to join.

The Career Mode is excellently designed. You compete in a number of events, ranging from level 1, the lowest to level 10, the highest. There are a smaller number of events in each level as you work your way up, although they do become more time consuming. You also have the freedom to choose which cars you buy and each car also has some liveries (paint jobs) for you to pay for and unlock.

Overall, this a great, well designed game and is a fantastic tribute to Colin McRae.

Colin McRae: Dirt is a racing simulation game developed and published by Codemasters. Originally released in June 2007, it is the sixth game in the Colin McRae Rally series, but the first with the Dirt title. It is also the first in the series released for the Xbox 360.

This is the first game I have played in the Dirt series and having recently played Forza Motorsport 2 I was looking forward to seeing how it compared. I found Forza 2 to be a disappointment and I must say that Dirt is a breath of fresh air in comparison. It is a much more well-rounded and enjoyable game in my opinion. That doesn't make it a perfect game however and I do still feel that it has a number of flaws, which I will go into later in the review.

The game has some very strong points: In particular the graphics which in my opinion are at least as good if not better than Forza Motorsport 2. The vehicles in the game all look great and immediately distinctive from one another. The tracks also are extremely detailed and much more interesting and varied to drive on than those in Forza. So much so that they make Forza’s tracks and environments look positively bland in comparison. Yes, it is true that both games are based on real-world tracks which have been recreated, but I guess that the off-road/rally style just appeals to me more personally.

The handling of the cars is somewhat more arcadey in Dirt compared to Forza 2, although this is perhaps more a reflection of the fact it is a rally game rather than a straightforward track racing game. For example, there are plenty of opportunities for stunts such as jumps, drifting and handbrake turns, which Forza did not really feature to any great degree. Similarly, if you turn a corner too sharply, drive up a bank too fast or crash into a barrier too hard your car will overturn, flip or barrel roll. Physics are something that I enjoy hugely in games and I felt the lack of these was a huge omission from Forza, and actually detracted from the realism, rather than adding to it. Granted, there is a point at which such physics can turn a game into an arcade racer rather a simulation racer but I feel that Dirt addresses this balance well and is perhaps just reserved enough to still be classed a sim racer rather than an arcade racer. There were a few instances where the physics made me laugh out loud and could not be considered at all realistic, but for the most part I felt they were fairly believable.

There are 46 vehicles available in the base game, which sounds like it should pale in comparison to Forza's 303, however I found the lineup to actually be far more varied and interesting. In Forza you basically just have a selection of performance cars and super-cars, whereas in Dirt you have a range of vehicles at your disposal including 4x4s, trucks and buggies. Each vehicle in the game looks, sounds and handles differently. As a result of this the race types are also more varied and there are far more tracks available than in Forza. Whilst I preferred the CORR and Rally Raid race types where I was racing against other vehicles on the same track, nevertheless the Rally and Hill Climb events were a welcome change of pace which allow you to just focus on just the track and the instructions of your co-driver. I felt like it was a case of quality over quantity in Dirt, which is a very good thing.

I found career mode to be fairly lengthy, but I'm sure it can be completed fairly quickly if you are just breezing through playing on an easy difficulty level. However, if you choose to play each race more than once going for the Driven in excess of 1,000 miles achievement, it will certainly take you quite a while. Playing on anything less than the Pro difficulty doesn't really provide too much of a challenge, but the jump to Pro can be quite steep on certain tracks and will require you to play them over and over again until you master them. I enjoyed competing with my friends' times on tracks and trying to better their fastest laps. For the most part, you won't see tracks repeated very often throughout the game either, which is testament to the amount of different courses they have put into the game. Towards the end of the game you will notice some repetition but it isn't overbearing in the same way that Forza 2's career mode was.

There is also a fairly high level of damage modelling in Dirt and every little bump and scrape will slowly chip away at your car's bodywork and the structural integrity of your components. For the most part this looks and feels great: As you take more damage your performance will slowly decrease until your car is so damaged that it is no longer drive-able and you reach terminal damage which means a forced restart of the race. Equally, if you crash hard enough on higher difficulties you can instantly reach terminal damage, something that I felt was a welcome and realistic addition. My only gripe with the game's reset system was in situations where if you accidentally misjudge a corner and fly off the road or you cut a corner too sharply the game will instantly reset you back onto the road. I found this a little bit annoying as I would have preferred the choice over whether or not to reset to be kept firmly in my hands. Similarly, I found the game wasn't really consistent with the way it would reset me, for example, sometimes I would cut a corner only slightly and I would be reset and other times I would veer wildly from the track and wouldn't be reset. This is really a minor criticism though and didn't detract overly from my enjoyment of the game.

One area in which I felt the game did not match up to Forza 2 though was in the vehicle customisation options. Each of the 46 vehicles on offer has between three and five skins or "liveries" which can be unlocked using the in-game currency. Often I would buy all of the liveries only to find that I didn't really like any of them. Beyond this there are no customisation options whatsoever. You can't choose your vehicles' colours or decals for example which I would have really appreciated considering Forza had such a full suite of options just a month earlier than this game was released. Overall though this is a fairly minor critique which can also be overlooked.

I played the game for just over 22 hours of racing time and probably a few hours longer than this due to time spent in the menus and listening to Travis Pastrana's descriptions of vehicles and tracks. I'm confident that the game can be completed significantly quicker than this however, as I played many of the events on all five difficulty levels one after the other in order to rack up additional mileage, which in the end was much more than I needed for the 1,000 miles achievement. I unlocked all 49 of the game's achievements and I would say that none of them are difficult to get in terms of skill and that all except the three online achievements should come naturally playing through the game's career and championship modes. I had to boost to get the two multiplayer achievements but fortunately they are very simple and should only take around 10 minutes at most to pop. The game is a little time-consuming but nothing too major and fortunately finishes just in time before it starts to get boring.

As a racing game I certainly think Dirt rates higher than Forza Motorsport 2 and Project Gotham Racing 3, but perhaps falls slightly short of the enjoyment I had with Burnout Revenge and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. My criticisms of the game largely revolve around the fact that it is still slightly too serious and too much of a simulation for me to really enjoy it as fully as I would a slightly more arcade-style game. After all, games to me should be fun at the end of the day and this is primarily what I look for and base my reviews on. I am confident in saying that Dirt is an above average racing game and probably an above average game overall. I would recommend it to fans of both simulation and arcade racing games especially if you have an interest in the off-road and rally disciplines.

Wow! 5 stars! Bravo Codemasters, you made a game without any achievement glitches (GRID). I love the off-road racing and graphics are awesome. Colin Mcrae is a boss for being part of such a good game. DiRT has a pretty good single player career along with great online multiplayer. I love that in this game you can race in over six countries all around the world. And the best part is there are 13 different classes of vehicles to choose from. DiRT also has a "Champinoship Mode", which is single-player and lets you do Rally Championships, ranging from 3-30 races. As for the characters in the game go, Travis Pastrana does the menu intros, and end race celebrations, and Colin Mcrae is a A.I. driver who races against you throughout your career!
Looking forward to DiRT 2 in september!

R.I.P. -Colin Mcrae- R.I.P.