According to my Steam records, this is the game that I had left unplayed for the longest time. I loved the first Dirt Rally so much that I bought this sequel quite eagerly. But I also knew that I wouldn’t want to play on anything other than a real driving wheel and I kept putting off that expensive purchase. I did finally get around to buying one this year, choosing Thrustmaster’s T300 and after resolving some initial problems getting everything to work, the gaming experience has been everything I’d hoped it would be. I’ve now put in more hours into than I have into the first game and I still feel that I’ve only completed a fraction of the game and there is still so much room to learn and improve.

Graphically the sequel is improved though I don’t think by that much. Some of the in-cockpit details actually take a step back, perhaps to accommodate VR? Track degradation which as its name states means the tracks are damaged as more cars drive over it is a great feature but the textures to show degradation sometimes look really bad. Darkness, rain, heavy snow and even dust clouds during the Rallycross events are all much scarier now but I think it’s ridiculous how they make the rain-slicked asphalt roads look like mirrors. The hill climb event is gone now, which isn’t a big deal to me, but the career mode is completely online now, which I do find annoying. The server is pretty reliable most of the time, but I did sometimes run into the can’t connect to server errors, always scary when you’ve just won a race and it threatens to undo your progress. You do always get the little connecting to server pause as you navigate between screens in career mode. It’s a small thing but the annoyance adds up over time.

The implementation of career mode is still kind of half-hearted as it’s just a series of random events added together to form a championship. I dislike how it forces you to drive a certain distance with each car to unlock each level of engine upgrade and being able to upgrade your engineers is sometimes useful but mostly feels like a pointless money sink. Engine upgrades do make a big difference, especially in the rallycross events, so it’s annoying that they’re gated in this way. Money also is something of a concern as the cost of repairing damage is significant and you receive money only at the end of each event. From what I understand most people mess around with career mode for a little while and then just play the historical mode which is offline and allows you to set the difficulty level or else just do the online community challenges. For my part I managed to make it to Elite in career mode the jump in difficulty is ridiculous and I’m nowhere near competitive in Elite.

Now all that sounds really bad but ultimately it doesn’t matter because the driving is so very good. It actually took me a bit of work for me to adapt to driving with a wheel after having plays these games my whole life with a controller. I was doing really badly for a long while as I had to retrain my muscle memory and I realized that I couldn’t in the game as I would a real car. It’s absolutely essential to use left-foot braking to be at all competitive. I also ended up restricting the wheel’s rotation because it’s just too much work in rallies to turn the wheel from one end to the other. Some would count that as a cheat as it’s unrealistic and not accurate to the actual cars. I do still mostly rely on automatic transmission but I do know enough to preemptively switch to a lower gear when approaching tough turns. Otherwise I have all assists off and use an in-cockpit view.

Once I got everything going right, driving with a wheel is so incomparably better that I started to lust after much more expensive driving gear. It feels fantastic to be able to feel the tension among all of the forces acting on your car from the resistance of the wheel. With a controller, extremely long curves like those in the Spain location were a bane for me as it’s near impossible to find and hold a fixed angle. With a wheel, those are a cinch and Spain is basically the easiest location for me now as I can consistently beat the AI times there. I’m also elated that the added control about the precise degree of acceleration with the pedals finally allows me to be competitive with RWD cars. They’re still really frustrating but it’s amazing when you finally get the hang of one. I’ve discovered that it’s a real pleasure to drive RWD cars on the Spain tracks since they can turn on a dime and so can take those tight curves on asphalt at speed so easily. It constantly surprises me how much feedback the wheel can provide. For example I’ve gotten used to the Argentina tracks but then I raced one in the rain and was shocked to feel like the muddy ground was pulling at the tires and I had to keep dragging the car out of turns.

I wasn’t a big fan of rallycross in the first game and I still like it a lot less than old-fashioned rallying. But I have gained an appreciation for the intensity of the races as you can wrestle with the wheel to keep control of the car as you rip through turns or even get hit by other cars. It’s still frustrating that you can win every heat you actually participate in and still lose overall based on points but I’ve seen how fast the best AI players can navigate through the track and I know I can’t match that. Given my still limited skills, the Thrustmaster T-300 works well enough for me for the most part. I am impressed with the wheel’s quality but like others have pointed out, the button for the handbrake is small and placed in an awkward position. I suppose that’s why people buy a standalone handbrake unit. I’ve also realized how important the pedal unit given how much force your feet exert on it and how quickly you must sometimes pump the pedals to keep control for example on ice stages. It would me feel a lot better to have an all metal pedal unit instead instead of the ones included in the T-300 which have metal pedal plates but the rest are plastic.

Even with the hill climb event taken out, Dirt 2.0 still offers more than a satisfactory amount of content with many more locations for rallies and rallycross races than the first game. There are plenty of cars to play and so many classes of cars. After logging well over a hundred hours, there are still entire categories that I haven’t experimented with. The edition I bought includes the Colin McRae Flat Out pack which includes scenarios with damaged cars. I haven’t touched those at all and may come back to them later. It also includes the Scotland location which scares me so much that I always skip it in career mode. It’s a location that expects quite high speeds but is absolutely filled with ways to kill you, from tree stumps half-hidden in grass just off the side of the road to super-narrow twisty paths with sharp drops. Many players love it but the only way to even complete a stage cleanly in it is to memorize it like the back of your hand and that is so daunting.

I could easily spend many more months in this game but I do have to move on to other stuff and I’m not a dedicated racer. This has been a fantastic gaming experience, full of magical moments when you finally get a car, such that you feel it glide around effortlessly almost completely guided by the pedals alone. I am further intrigued that most players agree that, excellent as Dirt Rally 2.0 is, this isn’t the best rally game currently available. The competing official WRC game has a more modern focus and perhaps better tracks. But people seem to think it has worse car physics and clearly worse graphics and sound. But the overall undisputed champion still seems to be the modded version of the by now very old Richard Burns Rally. I have heard a lot about this game over the years. Perhaps one day I will finally give it a go.