Colin's first outing in the "next-gen" and it's brilliant!
It's been two years since the last Colin McRae game and this one builds on what made the last one so great and adds to it. With a total of 6 different race types from the traditional Rally to hill climbs each offering something different. The variety of all the different types is great, in each event type they are split up into different classes big rig hill climbs for example which will mean that to master this game you'll not only have to be good on DiRT but just about every other surface there is!
The main part of the game will be in Career mode where you start your off road racing adventure. There are multiple tiers and you start all the way down the bottom. You select each race and what difficulty you want to play on it, then you can select your car out of a few that are available for that track. As you progress through the game you'll be awarded money to buy new cars and liveries for the cars you already own. With over 40 different cars in the game and about 170 liveries you'll be spending a long time to go all the way through the career mode. Career mode will take somewhere around 10 hours to play through just getting to the end but there's plenty of replay value going back through the game on a higher difficulty to get more money to buy the rest of the cars and liveries so you can get achievements!
Other than Career there are two other single player modes: Rally championship which is the classic mode you'll find in previous Colin McRae games and Rally World which is your exhibition mode.
There is an online mode in DiRT however it's not what you'd expect from a racing game, you don't actually "race" against the other cars in the sense that you're all on the same piece of tarmac at the same time. Instead you all start at the same time but you don't see anyone else, first one to the end wins. You have two race types for online; Rally and Hill Climb. What having no other cars on the screen does is enable 100 player multiplayer which would be impossible to do otherwise. The online interface is brilliant, you can pick a player, ranked or private game and it puts you in a room. Usually another race will be going on and you can follow how it's going. In the mean time ~8 random races will be up for vote and whichever gets the most wins! After you're done voting for the track you want there's a text chat with some prebuilt options put in so you can wish your opposition good luck or tell them all to enjoy looking at the back of your car. Overall the Online mode is good, although they could have included some multiple car modes in Rally cross, Corr or even Crossover with just one other car.
After you're done looking through the superb menu system to pick which one of the above modes to do you'll want to know how the racing actually is. When you've selected your car and difficulty you can listen to some information about the track up ahead from your co-driver, go out for a practice run or change your car set-up. After you're done that just go straight into the race and you're off! The different race types mean that they all handle differently but most importantly they ALL handle BRILLIANTLY. Tagging another buggy could see you spinning out of control into a wall or in Rally you take a corner too tightly and say good-bye to your 5 second lead!
One thing DiRT does brilliantly is the damage, the harder your difficulty the more damage that gets done to your car. Running wide and scraping the barrier could damage your side door while driving head first into a tree will cause your car to well... not look much like a car any more!
The Graphics in the game are fantastic however there is sometimes some slowdown with multiple cars on the track or when there's loads of debris going flying everywhere, this is very rarely though and doesn't last very long at all until it's back to normal.
Overall this game is brilliant and well worth a buy if you're into racing games, it'll keep you entertained for years to come. If you're ensure on if you'll like it or not (You'd be crazy not to) then download the demo as it gives you a good idea on the some of the modes in the game, but only a very small portion of it.