When DiRT 2 is doing it’s thing, it’s spectacular. Hammering down some back end road at an ungodly speed with your co-driver calmly listing out numbers and instructions; it’s racing at it’s best – a thrill like no other. Racing on the verge of chaos – 80mph along a knifes edge. It’s brilliant, power-sliding into perfect. That’s all DiRT 2 needs to be, but there is more here.
As with the last few racing offerings from Codemasters you start out in DiRT 2 as a just-turned-pro driver, entering races around the world to unlock cars and tracks in a sort-of career mode. Each race is for a certain class of car and all are a different take on the rallying experience – such as rally cross which is lap based, or driving trucks through mexico. Coming along for the ride, inexplicably, is Dave Mirra and a bit more sensibly Ken Block – for providing moral support and challenges for you to do. This is all cursory though, just a median for linking races together.
Importantly, the race engine is solid. It’s the same one as used in GRID though seemingly with added mud physics and dirt effects; and by no means is this a complaint – it’s a damn good engine. The cars feel rugged but like they could kill you in a split second. It nails the sense of speed and claustrophobia that rallying demands, and it brings across the need for almost twitch driving – micro adjusting for each bump but then getting that big slide through a hairpin when you need it. It brings in that ‘flashback’ feature from GRID too, so if you crash you can rewind time a little and try a corner again; a god send for any racing driver but still makes the same mistake as being a little too slow getting you back into the race.
DiRT looks stunning too. GRID looked good but this pushes everything a bit further – it’s convincing. Dropping into cockpit view I’m sure would make people double take whether it was real or not – and that’s by no means me getting over excited. It really is amazing. In fact, it’s rare to see a game so consistently photogenic – at any point you could take a screenshot and it’s going to look good – especially crashes. The physics engine and damage system combine for some wonderful crashes; seeing car parts fly through clouds of dust and mud is both gorgeous and spectacular – cutscenes don’t do crashes that good.
There is, however, a massive problem with DiRT 2 – only a small portion of it is actually a rally game. Most of it is an over excitable racing game that for me, doesn’t work. The majority of the races you will do are straight races. Five other cars on the same track at the same time competing for first – all of whom will have annoying frat-boy like phrases. “Dude” is a perfectly acceptable term here, and when thrown at you by some ‘hip’ youngster, it grates on me.
What Codemasters have done here is try to make rallying EXTREME! Fireworks are going off all the time as you race, rock music plays in the menu screens as text bangs onto the screen in bright pinks and greens. Dave Mirra enthuses that you are ‘awesome’ and tells you to ‘save some energy for the party after’, and it only serves to frustrate because DiRT takes an aching amount of time out to load all this stuff while all I want to do is drive cars. DiRT 2 wants to be the cool kid, putting you in show-off glamorous races with top end rally cars, living the EXTREME sports dream while shoving flashy menus in your face to prove to you that it’s slick. It doesn’t feel right – there isn’t a Peugeot 206 or a Ford Focus in sight – instead there are BMW Z4s from the offset – it’s missing that rallying heritage and is constantly distracting from the core experience.
DiRT 2 is a solid racing game. It’s pretty, the driving works, and you have a steady curve of progression – the full racing package. It’s not a rallying game though. Rallying is a Sunday afternoon thing. It’s about mud, noise and going extremely fast down awfully narrow roads. It’s about 2 men in a car versus a track that could kill them. It’s about technical skill and respect; nothing else. DiRT 2 is a game about bombastic racing and showing off, designed for excitable post-teens after EXTREME racing. If you just want to race cars you will find a lot to love here, but if you’re after a proper rallying experience you should probably look elsewhere.
