Where is the dirt in Colin McRae DiRT?
I will start by telling you what I liked, for example the environments wich look awesome and how the cars look while they are driving, with the suspension working over every bump in the road. I especially liked the buggy racing, as you can really see all that at work in there. Rally racing is quite enjoyable and so is hillclimbing (though the difference is basically limited to having no co-driver). Racing the pickup trucks is nice too.
The damage system is the best i have ever seen and the well made replay mode lets me see the car fall apart again and again. Now the unfortunate bad things about DiRT.
First:
Where is that dirt? Almost nonexistent! Take the dust for example, it looks right until a few meters after the rear wing of the rally car and then it just drops off.
Here is what dust looked like in CMR 4
http://moddie666.dyndns.org/colin04.jpg
Of course the dust looks nicer in DiRT but there is just not enough of it.
And the way dirt builds up on your car is a joke at best, the car gets dirty after a few turns and stays that way until the end, i would really have liked slow buildup of dust or dirt on the cars. And rally cars should not look shiny at the end of a stage in australia!
Next the weather effects, they look nice and realistic, but there is no raining and no snowing (no snow whatsoever). The wet tarmac looks way too shiny when there is no sun to shine on them. There is also no night racing.
The cars don't feel right on the track if you have played any of the previous CMR games. If I wanted arcade I would have waited for Sega Rally.
I long for the days of CMR 1 where I could race at night, and I particularly remember a dirty jungle stage in indonesia, with a vicous thunder storm to drive through!
All in all CMR DiRT is a solid game and visually stunning, but not what I would have expected from the NextGen Premiere of CMR.
gameplay: 6
graphics: 9
sound: 6
value: 5
tilt: 4
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overall: 6
greetings
/moddie