Colin McRae Dirt review

Indeed, even poor old Colin McRae, is reduced to the status of a wallflower as Codemasters openly flirts with their audience. Your navigator screams annoying messages of encouragement at you at a rate of knots. While you’ve got to congratulate the guy for excelling in his chosen career path despite the considerable drawback of having a completely paralyzed face, you’ll still wish Codemasters thought to map an ejector seat on the bumper buttons.

We’re getting bogged down with things that don’tmatter a great deal. The simple meat of the matter is that Colin McRae: Dirt is a compelling package, absolutely rammed with content, and - crucially - not one bit of it sucks. Getting the best times on the rally events is as furiously addictive as ever, and even rally virgins will soon be memorizing vague instructions in order to gain an extra edge. At the other end of the spectrum, the racing events don’t suffer despite their “me too” feel - although the simple-minded AI obviously didn’t get the memo that it’s not 2002 any more. Luckily, their buffoonery isn’t dimwitted enough to spoil the overall racing experience.

Indeed, even poor old Colin McRae, is reduced to the status of a wallflower as Codemasters openly flirts with their audience. Your navigator screams annoying messages of encouragement at you at a rate of knots. While you’ve got to congratulate the guy for excelling in his chosen career path despite the considerable drawback of having a completely paralyzed face, you’ll still wish Codemasters thought to map an ejector seat on the bumper buttons.

We’re getting bogged down with things that don’tmatter a great deal. The simple meat of the matter is that Colin McRae: Dirt is a compelling package, absolutely rammed with content, and - crucially - not one bit of it sucks. Getting the best times on the rally events is as furiously addictive as ever, and even rally virgins will soon be memorizing vague instructions in order to gain an extra edge. At the other end of the spectrum, the racing events don’t suffer despite their “me too” feel - although the simple-minded AI obviously didn’t get the memo that it’s not 2002 any more. Luckily, their buffoonery isn’t dimwitted enough to spoil the overall racing experience.

But there’s one critical thing to know about Dirt and that thing is this - Dirt promises us a mud-bath, and then tips barely half a flowerpot over our heads. Everything is far too sterile and clinical for a game of this nature, especially after experiencing what we have on the PS3’s MotorStorm. Every suggestion that enters your head from looking at Dirt in motion is that the engine is clearly capable of better things - Dirt, more than anything, feels like a test run for something even better in the Neon Engine’s near future.

There’s one other critical thing to know about Dirt, and that’s the online multiplayer, which falls short of the expectations we have. Instead of featuring a head-to-head mode, Dirt online instead concentrates on the rallying aspect, grouping you into leagues of around 100 and inviting you to attack either a rally event or a hill climb in order to scale the charts. It’s a good way to measure how far you’ve come against human opposition, but it’s a big mistake for Codemasters to expect this mode to carry Colin McRae: Dirt when there are so many more comprehensive packages available elsewhere. Perhaps head-to-head is being considered as an additional download later down the line? Sadly, there’s no doubt such an extra will require us to reach into our pockets once more.