That stretches to pretty much the entire game experience, of course, with the Ego engine now flexing its lighting systems across a huge selection of attractive and highly detailed environments. These result in some spectacularly tricky conditions, as well as looking superb. Speaking of treachery (and retirement from boyracery, come to think of it), one of the additions to the game includes the weather stuff from F1, which now delivers heavy snow and pouring rain the tracks. Fewer assists here, more challenging AI there, until the races become a competition, without ever really making me accept that I am just a retired boy-racer from Kent. Of course where the joy is for the likes of me is stripping that away to a point where it feels challenging, without actually being treacherously simulatory. It's so friendly that even our time-travelling correspondents from the 1870s should have little trouble getting their head around good track times. It artificially stabilises the car, gives you the perfect racing line as a visual cue (as you will have seen in F1, I believe) that even tells you went to brake by showing whether you are going too fast for a corner. The default setting for driving is the gaming equivalent of leaving the house wrapped in cushions and wearing a crash-helmet.
What I do love is the breadth of options that the game provides. I don't begrudge this now being General Offroad as a game theme, but we all know that rallying is best. You pretty much have to go off and do other events, which wasn't quite as true in Dirt 1, or indeed previous rallying games in the Colin McRae series. What I really want from an offroad racing game is a fully afternoon of rally, and there really isn't enough of that here, with each section being a couple of stages taking up a couple of minutes. I love these the best, and there are plenty of them.ĭisappointingly, however, the true rallying stages do seem short. Once again there's also the return of the superb trailblazer tracks, which essentially see you trying to make the best time along a single course with an absurdly overpowered car and no navigator. Once again there's some traditional rallying, complete with reliable navigator noises, some rallycross, and a few other random events, such as hill-climbs and Preposterous Offroad American Truck Thrashing (I think that's what it's called). We'll let that pass, however, and focus on the stuff that I do enjoy, which is pretty much all the other racing events. It's a stage that you cannot skip in the single-player tour – a baffling decision when the previous tour menus of Dirt 1 & 2 were so open and forgiving of what events you'd have to participate in. I could have screamed when I realised I was going to be forced to make my Ford Fiesta dance like a ballerina for an imaginary crowd of open-mouthed Londoners. This would have been fine if it was optional, but it is not optional. Instead you are obliged to spin and slide your way around a number of plastic bollards. The first of these might be set in Battersea power station, but it is most certainly not within the spirit of old fashioned British Rallying. I'd imagine it's a place that cars dream of, and Codemasters have been granted access to it by the ghost of a Ford Cosworth, or something like that.Īnyway, the transatlantic nature of the game has not disappeared, because one of the core sections is a Ken Block-led “Gymkhana” series. There's no carnival trailer-yard pseudo-character menu here, just some platonic shapes floating in a strange menu dimension. This third Dirt game seems to have stepped back a little from the excesses of the previous game, in which the attempt to merge the relatively austere accelerated dangers of rallying with the XTREME AWESOMENESS of our American Cousins' X-Games branded attitude sports experiences seemed a little-the-top. It takes a broad approach, and tries to be as lively as possible in its portrayal of hi-tech hatchbacks and vintage rallycars alike. Tight, satisfying, forgiving off-road racing, it most certainly is. It's been true that Codemasters' recent racing games have satisfied these desires for me for the past few years, and Dirt 3 is no different. I want the sense of speed and the feel of mass, but without the hubris of honest handling. I want the thrill of sliding on gravel, but not the actual physics. I just want to throw a car about and not care about the consequences.
Perhaps it's down to years of trying to compete with my Grand Prix Legends-loving chum and sliding off at the first or second corner on each attempt, or perhaps it's because I just want something different from racing. In some areas of gaming I enjoy simulation, even crave it, but not in racing. Good thing too, because I've come to realise that my tastes are not consistent. Dirt 3 slid neatly into its release spot on Tuesday, before accelerating its way onto my hard-drive.
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