Almost There, But Not Quite..
Great rally racers find a way to mix sim aspects with an arcade spirit. The sport, by its nature, features a lot of power sliding around narrow corners in rustic settings, creating a sense that you're somehow defying the laws of physics. But that's true rally racing. DiRT does a great job of offering both an arcade experience (for those who are faint of heart) and a hardcore challenge (for those with balls of stone). The default difficulty keeps the challenge fairly lax. Crank up the difficulty setting and suddenly every fast turn becomes risky and any crash can prove fatal. Few games offer two different sets of experiences, but DiRT does it better than most. So whether you are just a casual racing fan or a Colin McRae nut, you can have fun racing across the beautiful wilderness vistas of DiRT.
The bulk of the single-player experience is in the career mode -- an epic pyramid of increasingly difficult racing challenges. It consists of six different rally events: Rally, Crossover, Rallycross, Rally Raid, CORR and Hill Climb. These are equally distributed throughout career, meaning that those who love time-trial rally racing will find considerably fewer of these events than in previous CM games. While that might be reason to complain, the multi-car races fit perfectly into the grittier attitude of DiRT. The healthy variety of race types keeps the career mode interesting from the bottom of the event pyramid up to the top.