Pros
- +
Varied stages challenge you in different ways
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Difficult but hugely rewarding
- +
Unapologetically challen𝐆ging representation of🍰 rallying
Cons
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Unflinching difficulty might scare new players
Recommended reading
Dirt Rally review
Varied stages challenge you in different ways
Difficult but hugely rewarding
Unapologetically challen𝐆ging representation of🍰 rallying
Unflinching difficulty might scare new players
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You’d struggle to find a more solitary pursuit than rallying. Of⛎ten with no other cars on the track, taking to the road with the sole goal of posting the fastest time is an unashamedly lonely experience. It’s also one that, from Dirt Rally’s opening menu screens right through to the deep ♌and dirty action itself, Codemasters has looked to replicate in a manner that hasn’t been attempted for a decade or so.
Dirt Rally is a racing sim that recalls an era long gone, before tutorials and hand holding. It’s curious that Codemasters has decided to attach its latest rally sim to the Dirt brand - a series that, along with its sister franchise GRID, was famed for allowing players to rewind time when🎃 they made a mistake, as well as decorating the action with something as close to a storyline as you’re ever likely to get in a racing sim.
No such measures are taken within Dirt Rally. Within 20 minutes of picking up your first car, you’ll take tꦬo the track in the snowy slopes of Switzerland and the plains of Finland. Before long, you’ll be having a splash in the muddy fields of a damp and dreary Wales. DiRT Rally never lets you take a ride on a test track, or flash scores of instructions across the screen. You belt up, listen to your orders from your co-driver and go🍷.
Rather than taking you directly to the game’s showroom to pick up your first car, Dirt Rally trusts you and lets you buy one at your own pace. It’s a small point, but one that sets the tone for everything that follows. On the track, Dirt Rally 🍒is a particularly unforgiving beast. Every bump, every puddle, every patch of ice has an impact on your vehicle. That’s especially true during your first championship, when you only have access to a batch of cars from the 1960s - cars which sometimes drive like an old tin bath with four pram wheels stuck to the 𓃲bottom.
It was when attempting to scale the heights of the Swiss alps in the now 50-year-old Lancia Fulvia, wheezing as it does like a𒊎 40-a-day smoker, that Dirt Rally’s true intent became clear to me. This is not an arcade racer, or even a rally sim for the fans of the popular but comparatively simple Colin McRae. Dirt Rally is a genuine, blunt simulation of rallysport. If you think you’re going to get an easy ride in the first contest or two, you’re mistaken. You’ll be lucky to even finish.
Fortunately, however,ꦆ Dirt Rally gives you plenty of races to recover. Championships, which make up the main thread of play, are broken down into multiple events, which in standard rallies consist of four separate time trials. With no indication as to how you’re doing other than split times comparing you to the race leader, success in Dirt Rally is a case of keeping your car on the straight and narrow, pressing your foot down when ༺you dare and listening to the ceaseless commands from your co-driver. Throughout play, he is your one consistent aid, although listening to his calls - which rarely leave room for breath - feels like cracking a code Alan Turing would be proud of. There’s no “easy left” or “hard right” here. Every bend is graded from one to six, with 90 degree turns or hairpins highlighted with particular caution. Crests, bumps, and hazards all tumble from your co-driver’s mouth like a foreign language. Visual aids stream across the screen at the same time, in an attempt to keep you up to speed.
At first, attempting to follow commands in any meaningful fashion seems like an impossible task, but it soon starts to feed into your subconscious. Focusing on the vanishing point and delicately snaking your way through its stages starts to become second nature. The variety of these stages is arguably Dirt Rally’s greatest strength. Speeding through the forests of Finland is a distinctly different thing to successfully scaling the icy heights of one of the game’s many mountain passes. Jumping from one event to the next constantly keeps you on your toes. With its narrow, pe💜rilous tracks, Dirt R♐ally never allows you to feel comfortable.
Crashing into a stray tree or clipping a stone wall not only slows you down, but also has an impact on your car. Tires burst, radiators overheat, and you can frequently find yourself hobbling over the finish line with a slack time simply because you’ve lost control of your car once in an otherwise clean and competitive race. Veering off track or recovering your car after flip♉ping it will trigger a time penalty. A bigger concern is the ease with which you can write you🀅r car off altogether. Repairs can be carried out in between races, but major incidents in the middle of a challenge can be fatal, with restarts chipping away at the credit you pick up for completing an event. It's perfectly fair, but devilishly unforgiving.
As an aside to the standard rallie💫s, Codemasters has also spiced up play with hill climbs and official FIA World Rallycross Championship challenges - the latter enabling you to race other cars directly on the track. These rallycross events are split into qualifying heats, semi finals and a final encounter, with a 'Joker lap’ - a trickier, longer stretch of ꧙track you have to deviate down at least once in a race - adding a smart tactical element to proceedings. The better you perform in these rallycross encounters, the more credit you pick up at the end.
