Codemasters acquiring the official World Rally Championship license effectively killed off the Dirt franchise in favor of this game as its successor. As a huge fan of rally games, I was going to play this but before I could get around to it, fans and the market collectively decided that it’s a dud and so the attempt to kickstart a whole new series of games died before it could properly get off the ground. Indeed, I’ve found myself that while it is able to feature the latest rally cars due to the WRC license, it is markedly inferior to its predecessor in many respects including graphics, sound and perhaps even personality.
As advertised, with this title Codemasters switched to Unreal Engine 4 from their own in-house one that was used in the previous Dirt games. The main benefit is that it allows them to make much longer stages, up to over 30 km long which is easily more than twice the length of the longest stages in Dirt Rally 2.0. Along with the license, we get the newest Rally1 cars along with cars from the other official WRC categories. Of particular note are the cars with hybrid capability, allowing them to get a boost from battery power. I don’t believe that any of previous Dirt games had hybrid cars. Other new features include a proper career mode in which you get to participate in various events over the course of a calendar year and a builder mode which lets you build your own rally car from different parts. The rallycross mode is gone. Instead we have a new type of rallying event, the regularity rally which rewards not pure speed but the consistency to stick to a predetermine speed throughout the stage.
The much longer stages are very welcome of course but appear to come at the cost of significantly degraded graphics. While visuals are subjective, it’s hard to deny that when compared side-by-side with each other the graphics of this newer game lacks the wow factor of its immediate predecessor. The stages look less vivid, the models less detailed, everything is just lackluster. Looking at the human models inside the car for example, it’s notable how lifeless and fake they seem. Even up to this day, I’m still impressed by the videos of Dirt Rally 2.0 fans keep posting but comparable footage of this newer game are unexciting. This lowered quality is similarly noticeable in the sound effects and especially the navigation calls of the generic co-driver. It’s impossible to deny that in terms of production values, this is a step back and that alone goes a long way to explain why so many players have drifted back to Dirt.
Due to both these disappointments and some general jankiness including bugs in the tutorials, I decided not to take this game too seriously and dialed down the difficulty a little. I don’t pretend to be skilled enough as a sim racer to judge the accuracy of the driving model but I’d say that this game seems a little more forgiving than Dirt Rally 2.0. It’s easier to keep control of the car and to cleanly get through the stages. I also notice that this game is a lot stricter about cutting corners. The previous game was notoriously lax about shortcuts that players ruthlessly exploited to massively cut down on their times. This time even the slightest deviation from the route is punished by adding penalty time. I’m unhappy though about the totally unrealistic physics of colliding with fences, bushes and other small objects on the sides of the road. It’s like running into a solid invisible wall instead of the obstacle crumpling as you might expect. Finally though the gameplay might be easier, some of the stages are extremely difficult, perhaps unfairly so. I found it almost impossible to see where I’m supposed to go in the Guanajuato Rally México stages without switching to an exterior camera view.
The career mode was a feature that I was excited to try but it ended up being somewhat boring because most of the decisions that you can make aren’t very consequential. Yes, you can browse through engineers, hire them and manage the budget for how much they cost and their stamina. But they don’t do much unless your car takes serious damage and if that happens, you’re probably not in the running to win anyway. Having to please your sponsor sounds like a neat idea but it’s rather easy to hit their targets and once you do, it no longer matters what else happens in the racing season. You don’t have your own pot of money to manage so there really is no point in entering racing events your sponsor doesn’t care about. Some events require a team victory so you need a teammate, another car in the same class and separate engineers. That gets expensive and you have no control of the results. Your teammate will just automatically do his own runs and you don’t even get to watch them. The builder mode seems similarly superficial. Most of the choices seem to affect aesthetics only as the functional parts perform identically. It’s only that the more expensive parts are more durable. These features seem to have been implemented just to complete some bullet-points without any consideration of how much fun they are.
Apart from the longer stages, there are a few other features that I liked about this game. The weather appears to have some ability to change during a stage itself as it was quite a shock when moderate rain turned into heavy rain while driving. I appreciated the Rally Pacifico location as rallying through an Indonesian oil palm plantation just rocks. Driving the hybrid cars are such a delight as they’re so powerful and yet so easy to handle. But in general, I’d prefer to go back to playing Dirt Rally 2.0 like everyone else. It’s just a prettier, more exhilarating game. If this game were still being updated, it might still be a contender. Some added randomness to the racing seasons might be nice and I’m not sure the AI times under different conditions are quite fair. But it’s a dead game and now Assetto Corsa Rally is about to be released so there’s even less reason to play this.
