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The attenpted arcadie racing sim, not so arcadie.

User Rating: 7.5 | Colin McRae: DiRT X360

By mrjam0 | Review Date: November 2, 2007

I'm not a big racing sim fan, but a do appreciate one when i see one. DIRT, the off road racing game attempts to appeal a little more towards the arcade fans, but for those arcade racers who made the mistake of picking up this game, were soon to find out how DIRT fails in that attempt. With that said, lets jump into the review. In career mode, you start off at the bottom of a pyramid where you climb levels called Tiers. Immediately this game would turn away non-sim racers as for the first half of career mode you spend most of your time racing through trial runs, which makes the pacing of the game extremely slow and very boring. During the trails, you co-pilot Chris will navigate you through the course. At first, most first time rally racers wont have a clue what he's saying. But as you progress through the game (provided that you pay attention) you'll begin to pick up on phrases such as, "60 left 4". The game does give you the option of selecting what difficulty you want to race on. So if you don’t want to have to suffer through the same course multiple times, you can just dumb down the difficulty to Amateur or lower, and cake walk through the race. They also throw in another mode called Cross-over which is basically s trial run, but one other car is racing you on a different track occasionally "crossing over" yours. As you make your way up the pyramid, you'll earn money if you make a podium position. With that money, you'll buy certain cars in each series. The hard core will go ahead and buy every single car. The casual will just rack up enough money so that they can buy the best in the series. The graphics are quite stunning, as you can see the lighting reflect off the road and cars, and how beat up they look after you've smacked it around a few times. In multiple events the damage on the car carry over to the next race, and about every other course you complete, you'll be given the option of fixing damaged parts. The cars control as you would expect from a racing sim. It's not just pick up and play. But once you do get used to the controls, you'll become a pro, or in my case, pro am.
One particular problem i had with this game was the lacking in the variety of courses during the races. It seemed to me that more emphasis was put more into the trail runs, rather than the actual races. One course in particular, featured in the opening cinematic, would have been perfect to race on. But instead, its only available in Hill Climb. Another is the inability to cut corners. Call me cheap if you want, but sometimes in the slightest cut you take, the game will restart your car, often setting back a few positions, others you might cut a huge corner, but the game sets no punishment. Once you're half way up the pyramid, actual races do become more frequent all the way up to the top. Once you're done with career mode, if you're a casual/arcade racer, shut off the game, and move on to another, because in Championship mode, there are practically nothing but trials, and cross overs. This is a big let down as this game does feature some good races. Multiplayer mode is only available in system link and X Box Live. That's another big let down because there is no excuse for a racing game not to include split screen. All in all, DIRT is a game strictly for the rally fans. Its a good game. it controls well, and looks good too. But it's lacking some things that make a racing game fun, actual races and split screen multiplayer. Now if you would excuse me, I'm going to turn in my DIRT and buy another game.

DiRT

The attenpted arcadie racing sim, not so arcadie.

Hang on, let me clear the mud out of my eyes...

Unnecessary capitalization issues aside, DiRT is an absolute blast.