Developer: Codemasters Racing Studio
Publisher: Codemasters
Platform: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
Tested on: PC
DiRT Rally – Review
Racing games have always appealed to a lot of gamers. They’re fun to play, they’re casual and you can sit back and relax while playing them. Then there’s DiRT Rally, it will challenge you in every way you can imagine, it’s extremely realistic and it’ll make you want to restart every track 20 times in order to get a good time.
Story
DiRT Rally doesn’t really feature any story at all. You simply get into the game and start racing, no frills attached. It would be pretty weird if it had a story because it’s more like a simulator kind of game, and a story doesn’t really fit in a simulator anyway. It’s all about the rally experience and a story would just be distracting you.
Graphics
The graphics in DiRT Rally are actually really great. Everything looks very realistic and the cars are beautifully detailed, even when driving in first person mode. It also looks very realistic when crashing or when you’re drifting through dirt and snowbanks. Even the mirrors in first person are extremely well detailed, something you rarely see in a game.
On the other hand, some issues occur from time to time. Sometimes, the ground textures start acting really weird and seem to be clipping or duplicating some textures, resulting in some really weird glitches. The tree textures also have really bad rendering distance, but this was probably due to performance rather than bugs or glitches.
Sound
Sound wise, DiRT Rally is extremely awesome. The cars sound very diverse and realistic, and also have different sounds compared to your camera angle or what camera mode you’re driving with. Your copilot also sounds extremely realistic and even reacts to the state of your car. He’ll say things like “water temperature creeping up” when your radiator is taking a beating and he’ll also inform you when your tire is punctured or lost.
Gameplay
DiRT Rally is a hardcore rally game by heart. It’ll challenge you in whole new ways and make you rage like never before when you total your car when there’s only one turn left. When you look at the basics, it’s actually a really simple game, but nothing seems less true once you start your first race. You can play the game with the good old WASD keys or use a controller (recommended). You can even go all out and use a steering wheel in combination with a manual transmission that goes up to 7 speeds.
When starting the game, you immediately have a couple of things you can do, but most players will go right into the career so they can get used to the game and acquire some cars. In the career, you have a couple of championships you can take part in. There’s the Rally, Hillclimb, Rallycross or the Fia World Rallycross Championship, which can only be unlocked after reaching professional status in the Rallycross league. In the start you’ll only have Rally at your disposal, this consists of a couple events which each have a few races. After every event you’ll get some credits according to the standings which you can use to buy cars so you can enter the Hillclimb and Rallycross, or you can buy a better rally car for future rally events.
Once you’ve acquainted yourself to the game and collected some credits, you can go do Hillclimb, which is literally what the name says. You get an extremely fast car and race up a hill as fast as possible, without trying to crash your car or fly off the hill. Then there’s the Rallycross where you usually race on a circuit against other cars.
The races themselves are extremely difficult and will challenge you a lot if you’re not good at racing games. In rally, you’ll constantly have your copilot saying what turns or bumps in the road are coming up so you can (try) to adjust to the course and still keep a lot of speed. In Hillclimb you’ll have to do your best to stay on the track with an extremely fast car. Finally, in Rallycross you’ll have to race on a circuit against other cars just like a real circuit race, but with some off road elements to them.
In between races in the Rally, you have the chance to repair your car a little bit in order to get you going for the rest of the races. There are loads of parts that can be broken and repaired so try to drive carefully! In order to repair your car, you’ll have to get a team of mechanics which each have skills in their respective fields. So it’s smart to recruit mechanics that are good at repairing tires if you have a lot of flats while racing. Furthermore, your crew development can also level up the more you drive with a specific Crew Chief. Having him level up in experience will up your team skill and also give you perks for minor improvements.
Hardcore players have their work cut out for them as well. You can tweak a lot of gameplay preferences to optimize your driving experience. You can adjust settings like automatic, semi-automatic or full manual transmission, override the clutch, change your ABS, traction control, stability control and a lot more. It’s a party for hardcore rally fans as they’ll be challenged even more than usual. You can even make your windshield wipers manual instead of automatic!
Furthermore, you can also take part in online championships, do PVP events, do a weekly challenge and many more. There’s loads of content and cars for you to go around and you’ll easily spend a lot of time on this game if you’re serious about it.
Conclusion
All in all, DiRT Rally is one hell of a rally game. It has a lot of different cars and car classes, loads of different events and tracks and has plenty of game modes. You can go all out with a steering wheel and manual transmission or keep everything on default and still have an extremely hard time. The only downsides are that it has an extremely steep learning curve and the graphics can be a bit glitchy at times (maybe due to outdated drivers). TL;DR: it’s one of the best realistic rally games out there.
DiRT Rally - Review,
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