Dirt Rally 2.0 Review - A Racing Title Made for the Hardcore Racing Fan

Written by Chris Woodside on February 25, 2019

Reviews: A realistic racer that is as tough as the dirt it skids on, but rewarding to finally master.

This console generation, racing fans have been treated to some of the most tranquil racing games in quite a while. While many racing games are difficult to master, many in the genre have begun to focus more on the beautiful words and environments that modern consoles can create for you to drive in, while some racing franchises have even gone down the open-world approach. Codemasters latest entry in the DiRT Rally series definitely puts an end to the leisurely joyride racing fans have enjoyed the last few years with one of the largest learning curves in recent memory.

From the moment you begin your time with DiRT Rally 2.0, you are dropped immediately in the main menu with no explanation, tutorial, or even practice mode for new players to get acclimated to the unique driving mechanics of this game. While I strongly believe you can enjoy a game without necessarily being good at it, and the difficulty doesn't necessarily make the game bad, it still was a turn off to not have any contextualization for the game you are about to play. It seems as though DiRT Rally 2.0 is geared exclusively towards longtime fans of the series, with a large barrier of entry set up to prevent newer players from being able to catch up.

While the game does feature a free play mode, where you can test run different tracks in different countries without it counting towards your overall statistics, which is the best way available to hone your driving skills, I still spent most of my time in the career mode, competing to earn the best time and participating in daily, weekly, and monthly challenges. While I knew going into it the notorious difficulty that has followed this series around, though not the true extent of the difficulty, the one area that surprised me most was how good of a job a virtual off-road racing video game like this was able to test my endurance, and made me feel as though I was actually competing in the sport.

The progression system of the career mode also felt polished and dynamic. Rather than manually cranking up the difficulty of the AI racers I was racing against, the drivers seemed to get faster, and drive a lot cleaner, as I got better. This type of progression system allowed me to know when I was actually improving by pitting me against more advanced AI as I worked my way up through a system. This is what a career mode feels like it should be. You start out as an inexperienced rookie who struggles against mediocre competition, slowly rising through the ranks and becoming a better racer against even better opponents. Not everything about the career mode is seamless of course, as it is entirely online and I found myself often waiting longer than I should have needed to navigating through menus before beginning my race, but it still wasn't enough to detract enough from what was an otherwise enjoyable experience.

”Dirt

While some of the races are shorter, about 2 miles or so, if you do a full set of races you are bound to come upon some of the longer tracks in the game, some of which I saw as long as 9 miles or more. It was the longer races such as these where the excellence of the game really reared itself. After many hours of constantly failing and making adjustments and getting better, I finally felt as though I was able to take on some of these larger gauntlets. While the longer races themselves aren't actually any harder, the intensity of pressure of a single mistake making it impossible to top the leaderboard only mounted in these longer races where first place times were as high as 13 minutes in some cases. It proved to be an exhilarating test of endurance, stamina, and nerves as you intricately avoid every natural obstacle the developers threw your way. Make no mistake, the patience required to master the intricacies of the game is not for the faint of heart, and I myself am a far way away from being able to claim I actually know what I am doing (I chalk up winning any of these longer races to luck more than I do to actually having mastered the game.)

Other parts of the game stand out just as much as the satisfaction of finally succeeding on the gameplay side. While I noticed some inconsistencies from country to country, overall, many of the environments that you drive around in look just as good as the much-touted world of Britain in the latest entry of the Forza series. I noticed this most of all in the maps when it was raining outside and watching the road appear to get slicker and more dangerous as the rain continued to fall. Even the sound design felt clean and crisp, as I could genuinely hear the traction of the tires on the wet soil as I attempted to dig out of an embankment or struggle against a tight and sharp turn on slippery soil. It was this added dynamic to the game that added to the realism the gameplay was already providing me, and truly immersed me in the worlds they were creating. The one aspect of the weather system in the game that I was disappointed by was the fact that there was not really any tangible effect, other than aesthetics, of the different weather systems. It would have been an interesting dynamic to have fog be present in some courses to obstruct your view or wintry weather conditions to make the roads even slicker and more dangerous on some of the more advanced difficulties. For a game that so painstakingly has nailed the realism, this seemed like a surprising omission.

As beautiful as the game is to look at, there were some smaller issues that are better described as a minor annoyance rather than any larger issue with the game itself. Whenever you are racing, for example, you are given a person to assist you through your driver’s headset to warn you about upcoming turns and give you time to prepare. While I found his tips to be lifesaving in my early hours with the game where I wasn't entirely sure of what I was doing after I began to feel more comfortable the voice of your backseat driver started to become grating and monotone. I did not see anything readily available in the options that seemed to indicate I could turn off the voice either, which meant I was stuck with him. Even if there is no way to turn off the voice completely, it would be nice to be able to switch up the voices to add some variety and break up the monotony of hearing the same voice calling out to you along 10-minute runs.

While there were a few instances during my time with DiRT that I wanted to smash my controller in ways that only a Dark Souls game could make me want to (I could not resist the reference to the reputation this series has of being the Dark Souls of driving games), I was still ultimately glad and satisfied with the time I spent with it. If you are not a big enough fan of racing games to dedicate the many hours it will take to get good at the game, it might be difficult to recommend as an entry point to the series or even the racing genre itself. For those returning to the Codemasters series, however, what has given the series such a good reputation is back and the game is a technical marvel to look at. Outside of a few minor issues, DiRT Rally 2.0 is sure to go down as one of the most honest and realistic racing games of the console generation.