Gameplay: 10
Graphics / Scenery: 8
Story: 5
Acting: Null
World: 7
Lore: Null
Immersion: 10

"A Hardcore Rally Racing Simulator That Is Fun But Punishing To Casual Players"

I would call myself more of a "casual" arcade racing game fan. I loved the old "Burnout" series, as well as a few of the newer titles in the "Forza Horizon" series, but never much got into any other racing games, let alone simulators. Since I received this title for free, I thought I would check it out and give my thoughts from a casual racing fans' perspective.

"DiRT Rally" doesn't give too much advice to new players, so I had to find a lot of YouTube videos in order to get a gauge on what exactly was happening during races. Rallying is essentially what most casual racing fans would know as a "time trial point-to-point" race, except you are given nearly no information about the track ahead of you. This seemed a bit unremarkable to me at first, but once playing I found it to be much more exhilarating than I previously believed. The main source of information is given by your co-driver, who shouts out notes about upcoming turns, jumps, dips, and hazards. It took some getting used to, but after some trial and error the experience was fast-paced and felt super dangerous!

The presentation is very good except for a small issue keeping the game in fullscreen upon startup. Other than that, the graphics are super nice, with water and dirt effects splattering the windshield upon dips into large puddles and after nasty crashes. Your car takes a beating if you aren't careful as well, and keeps any damages across the different stages, giving a very high risk to reckless driving. That is where I start to have a bit of a problem with the game.

This isn't necessarily a "negative" about the game, more so an unfortunate realization from my perspective and experiences with driving games. Yes, the game is realistic. Yes, the game is fast-paced, tense, and gives a sense that the developers wanted to create a physics-based driving simulator that doesn't hold your hand throughout. This all makes it fun to an extent. But the game is very difficult, which led to a lot of frustration on my part. While I found myself impressed by the ferocity of the cars engines, the detail of each track, and the customization aspects of car parts themselves, I felt a disconnect between myself and who the game was made for. This game is clearly made for racing simulator enthusiasts, not for any casual racer like myself. Thus, when it came down to design, sacrifices had to be made in order to make a truly fantastic game for one group, wherein the other group would feel frustrated and believe the game is inaccessible and borderline average. This was my case after a few hours, and while I definitely think this game has good qualities both on the surface and underneath, its just not very enjoyable for me.

Still, I couldn't just go and write a review where I didn't support the game somewhat and point out some of the quality work put into it. I would personally Not Recommend this game despite the presentation, gameplay, and polish being there to make any simulator fan happy, because I am a more laid-back racing fan looking for something less intense and difficult, and more streamlined for my casual enjoyment. I will most likely continue on to play other games, but it was interesting to get a peek into the world of racing simulators and get a sense as to why they are loved by their fanbase, even if it did not convince me to jump ship into a new sub-genre of gaming.

Final Verdict: 5/10 (Average)

You know it's a simulator when you can tune your differential preload and it can make or break your performance. This is why I played all the other DIRT games before this one, even though this game actually came out before DIRT 4. It's nothing like any of them.

Codemasters got sick of people complaining at them about how unrealistic the DIRT games were, or for their lack of focus on rally events, and this is their response. A spin-off from the series focused almost exclusively on rally events, and delivering the most realistic experience it can without alienating the people without thousands of dollars in sim racing hardware. Difficulty isn't a choice anymore, because the point of the game is no longer to win, it's simply to finish in one piece, and finishing each stage is a highly challenging experience thanks to the physics actually feeling like you're on dirt this time, rather than a vaguely loose ambiguous surface like every other DIRT game, plus the stages - which are real-world rally stages now! - being narrow and full of hazards, and the innate drive to go as fast as possible through them. To accommodate for this refocusing of challenge, your opponents in career mode are spread minutes apart rather than seconds, so every position you gain is both hard-earned and a tangible display of your current skill level... though I personally wish the best drivers were a few seconds faster. And then you get in a new class of car and start all over again, because every class is dramatically different.

All personality is gone from the game, because it's no longer necessary. You're not here just for a fun thrill, you're here for a real challenge. In place of a personality is a laser focus on presenting you with the means to step up to that challenge. With the objective being simply to make it to the end in one piece rather than to take first place, the entire appeal of the game rides exclusively on how satisfying the driving experience itself is, and they nailed it. Cars are extremely responsive, twitchy but not punishingly so, and they are entirely predictable as long as you avoid pushing too far in your dance on the edge of control. However, that predictability can be undermined if you ruin the handling yourself with your tuning setup, which is something you will want to adjust in this game, because unlike the main DIRT games, tuning actually matters here... big time.

The default setup of every car is good enough to make work anywhere, but some well placed small adjustments here and there can make enough of a difference in the car to gain you a position, be it by actually improving the handling to suit the stage, or simply giving you more confidence as a driver to push harder. But of course, pushing harder means higher risks, so that confidence - while important - can be your undoing if the tune can't support you. There are no flashbacks in this game to save you either, you can only restart the stage if you mess up. All of this becomes even more important, challenging, and satisfying when you move into the online events, because in those, you can't even restart, you get one shot. You either finish or you retire, there are no other options. Apparently nobody plays those though, because according to Steam achievements, less than 4% of people have completed a weekly event. Shame, I love the idea of one-shot solo competition.

One thing I really hate about this game, though, is that for some ridiculous reason, the ability to properly set up your car is locked at first. You have to buy the car and then drive it long enough for your engineers to unlock "advanced setups" which happens to contain settings as simple as camber and toe angle adjustment, which is so often one of the most important settings for me to get comfortable with a car. On top of that, you have to drive cars for long enough to unlock weight reduction and increased engine power, which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't such a massive performance gain that all of your opponents have from the start. Being forced to drive a worse feeling and worse performing version of every car for several races before being allowed to really use it properly is a flat out stupid design decision and makes the game less fun.

Also, rallycross is here. This is the game that made me realize I just don't like rallycross. It's not fun, even in a game this well made. I do not enjoy running 26 laps across six different sessions on teeny little tracks with AI drivers that can't compete with me, especially not when the tracks also flat out suck to drive on like Höljes. Even with the significantly better driving experience, even with the significantly better head camera that actually moves, even with the significantly less annoying spotter, I just find the real-world rallycross format miserable. These races pay very little too, so after doing one championship I decided to pretend rallycross doesn't exist.

Much cooler than rallycross is hill climb, which is also here, returning for the first time since the first DIRT game nearly a decade prior. I love Pikes Peak so much, it's some of the most intense racing I've ever had in any realistic game, and attacking the mountain all alone with only the incredible sounds of the dirt and rocks underneath and the engine in my ears in a game as challenging as this is immensely satisfying. It's also an experience you can't get anywhere else, because Polyphony have been greedily sitting on the loathsome exclusive license to Pikes Peak since 2017. The biggest tragedy isn't that, though, it's that hill climb events in general seem to barely exist outside of this game without mods, and hill climb is one of my very favorite motorsport disciplines. There are probably some great mods out there, but it's a shame that there's so little official recognition for the discipline, and that it will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future thanks to the repugnant practice of exclusive licensing.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#dirt-rally)