Colin McRae: Dirt 2 Review

New and improved, Colin McRae: Dirt 2

I’ve been thinking for the past few months that I don’t have enough decent racing games and I could really do with something to tide me over until F1 2010 finally rears its head.  I was tossing up a few options when Matt solved all my problems by shipping me half a dozen different racing titles on Steam.  Colin McRae: Dirt 2 is the first cab off the rank, so to speak.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the game probably could’ve been called Ken Block: Dirt.  Colin McRae died tragically in 2007 so he obviously played no active role in the game.  Respect is paid to him at various points but it’s the current stars of the X-Games circuit that you’ll be racing and interacting with: Tanner Foust, Dave Mirra, Travis Pastrana, a bunch of others and of course everybody’s favourite sideways shoe salesman, Ken Block himself.  That’s right, there’s hardly a Finn in sight and it’s almost like the WRC doesn’t exist which makes you wonder, really, just how serious a rallying game this is?  We’ll get back to that question later.

I’ll get the main gripe out of the way first.  I had a lot of trouble with bugs in this game.  For the first couple of days it’d take half a dozen or more attempts at starting and then restarting the game to convince it to run without crashing in the first race.  This issue eventually sorted itself but ever since there’s been regular visual glitches and random crashes.  I consulted the forums, couldn’t find any reasonable fixes but did note with interest that plenty of other people were complaining about all sorts of different bugs of their own.

The whole thing is a massive pain in the arse, to the point where I almost chucked the game in.  I’m glad I didn’t though because once you’re finally behind the wheel of a car this game is a hell of a lot of fun.

There are several race modes to choose from.  Naturally there’s traditional rallying where you’re timed across a stage and everybody runs with a staggered start.  You get a co-driver who calls the upcoming corners for you and you can even choose between simple and technical pace notes.  Have to admit, I never progressed past simple.

Your driving looks much cooler in replay mode

Traditional rallying isn’t really the focus of this game though – the other race modes will take up most of your time.  Rallycross events have you racing on short, closed circuits against seven other cars.  I didn’t like these all that much because the results were often decided on who came out best in the inevitable first-corner pileup.  The same is largely true for the Landrush events, except instead of rally cars you have to compete in trucks and buggies.  Both these modes also employ the player-always-starts-at-the-back system that I hate so much, but I’ll let it slide since it’s not present for the whole game.

There are a couple of point-to-point race modes which I had a lot more fun with.  Trailblazer is very similar to the traditional rallying mode.  Cars start ten seconds apart and you have to post the best time, except you don’t get a co-driver giving you pace notes.  Raid events put you behind the wheel of a racing SUV, with seven other cars on the course that you’ll need to beat to the finish.

Gatecrasher mode is a twist on the rally events.  It has bunch of “gates” set up on the track.  Hitting one adds two seconds to your time bank, and the winner is the driver who reaches the end with the most time left on the clock.  I had some fun with this mode: knocking over bright yellow one-assumes-polystyrene barriers is strangely fulfilling, apparently.

One of the unlockable cars

There’s a decent variety of tracks to choose from, though the game does employ the old trick of running tracks in reverse or pasting two shorter tracks together to pad itself out.  You’ll get to race in stadiums (London, LA and Japan), forests and mountains (Croatia), jungles (Malaysia), deserts (Morocco and Utah) and far-flung bits of China.  Nowhere with snow and nowhere in Australia or South America however, which is a pity.

There’s also about three dozen cars to choose from across the different modes.  Some are the ones you’ll expect to see like the Impreza WRX (in various forms) and Lancer Evo (again, a few different models).  Others baffled me a bit – I never knew anyone raced BMW Z4s or Pontiacs of any description on rally courses.  Actual rallying makes like Citroen are conspicuous in their absence … must be an American thing.  Still, there’s plenty of cars to choose from and you shouldn’t have any problems finding one that suits your driving style or the needs of any given stage.

Even in the right car though I found I needed to log a fair few races before I was starting to make fast times.  Controlling oversteer is the biggest issue in order to make it around the bends quickly without either spinning out or understeering off.  Too much of either the brake or throttle, or get the angle wrong and you’ll be shooting off the course sideways, spinning out of control or doing a barrel roll.  Because of this you’ll be wanting an analog controller (does anyone play PC driving games without them these days?  I used my trusty Xbox for Windows controller).  It’s frustrating at first but I got a real sense of satisfaction once I started getting corners right.  Plus it can look great on the replay when you really nail a section.

The feel is skewed more to the arcade side of things rather than serious racing sim.  You can go in and fiddle with your car’s settings but I was winning races without bothering and didn’t notice an awful lot of difference when I did.  The upgrade options are pretty limited too – the ones that actually make your car go faster or perform better are sold in bulk lots that you’ll buy and then forget about, and a lot more attention is paid to new paintjobs, fluffy dice and, for some reason, what sound your horn makes.  I’m not sure I even found the button to honk my horn but there’s all sorts of custom tones you can install for it.  Oh – and car damage (if you’ve even got it turned on) is either superficial or terminal with no in between.  So dedicated sim racers probably won’t find a lot here to drag them away from rFactor but the rest of us will have some fun.

Some of the courses really are pretty

One feature the game seems especially proud of is its flashback system – in the middle of the race you can rewind the action and start driving again from an earlier point.  This is obviously great if you manage to screw a corner up really bad, spin, or even write your car off.  You have a limited number of flashbacks per race and the higher the difficulty level you choose, the less you get.

What I don’t quite understand though is why the game wants to reward you for using the system.  There are achievements and XP bonuses linked to the number of times you use the system and in-game magazine covers and headlines brag about how many times players have used it in total this week… which seems a little odd to me.  If you’re driving well surely you’d be using the system less, not more?  It feels kinda like rewarding someone for getting shot the most times in a first-person shooter – sure it’s trackable, but is it really the point?

I’m also not sure why such a big deal is made of it, since there have been racing games with equivalent or (arguably) better systems for years.

My co-driver was a bit pissy about this one...

Actually … achievements and milestones as a whole seem a bit silly in this game.  One of your milestones is to become “friends” with several of the pro drivers on the circuit.  That’d be all well and good, except that the game’s minimalist story suggests that you start out already being friends with most of them since they’re giving you free cars, upgrades and advice from the outset.  Maybe there’s some hippie message about rejecting materialism and only giving you the achievement when you’re really friends with them (as opposed to someone they spend a few hundred grand on for no reason) but whatever.  More achievements, pointless or otherwise, equals more XP equals more fluffy dice for your car.  Not kidding about the fluffy dice, by the way.

Building up your XP does have one practical benefit though: as you level up you unlock more races and locations.  The pinnacle of it all is competing at various championship and X-Games events, which probably tells the rally purists reading this everything they need to know.  If you don’t think fireworks have any place on a race course, then this maybe isn’t the game for you.

Speaking of fireworks, visually the game is stunning.  The cars look great and the tracks and landscapes you race through are fantastic.  I actually had a “holy shit!” moment the first time I raced one of the Utah trailblazer courses and got to hoon through giant canyon passes.  I guess we expect no less these days but it’s still nice to come across something that makes you go “wow”.

The soundtrack is pretty standard for a racing game these days, with a mix of indie rock and metalcore to keep you entertained/irritated between races.  Engine noises and the rest of the in-car audio experience is pretty hard to fault.  But then there’s the talking.  The other drivers will jabber away at you both in and out of races.  Outside they’ll tell you about new races that are available, issue challenges to you or give advice.  And they call you by your name, because there’s a nifty feature when you start a new game that lets you choose from a shitload of names for them to call you by.  And there’s nicknames as well, just in case your actual name isn’t on the list.

If your truck has more headlights than it does wheels...

During a race they’ll talk to you, encourage you, goad you or (most often) bitch at you for running into them.  This is something that irritated me because as someone once said in a terrible movie, “rubbin’s racin’”.  The AI drivers get pissy with you over the radio if you bump them but they make no effort whatsoever to avoid bumping into you.  When they do hit you they’ll either ignore you or get on the radio to tell you how it wasn’t their fault.  This is becoming something of a pet peeve of mine.  Dirt 2 certainly isn’t alone* in doing it, but if you’re going to espouse the virtues of “clean” racing then I think the AI cars should be making some effort to avoid collisions.  Especially when it’s almost always the player and not the AI car that comes off second-best in any given collision.

When you get towards the end of the single player career mode there’s a bit more tribute paid to Colin McRae himself.  You get to unlock a few of the signature cars that he drove and there’s a special rallying series dedicated to him where instead of the X-Games crowd you’ll be competing against some big names in the real motor racing world such as David Coulthard, Ari Vatanen, Valentino Rossi and McRae’s father Jimmy and brother Alister.  It’s a nice touch, given that McRae otherwise doesn’t get a lot of airtime in the game that bears his name.

You should get plenty of play time out of this game because even once you’ve beat all the career objectives there’s the online games to keep you entertained.  Your online ranking is decided independently to your single player one so those interested in enlarging their e-peen could keep racing indefinitely.

First corner on a Rallycross track

I didn’t have any problems getting into a game, though I did find that the Rallycross and Raid modes had the same problems online that they did in single player – being the one least affected by the first-corner crash seems to be a big key to winning.  The problem is actually magnified online since you don’t have the flashback system available.  Traditional Rally and Trailblazer modes were much more enjoyable because while everybody races at the same time all the other cars appear as ghosts so there’s no collisions.  Oh – you’ll want to mute all the other players unless you want to hear people driveling on and, worse, the tinny sound of their speaker output being recycled.

The game also runs regular online tournaments, the objective of which changes every week.  Sometimes it’s something you’d expect, like seeing who can post the fastest time on a given course.  Other times, like the week I finished writing this review, it’s something much sillier like who can roll their car the most times in a week.  Outstanding performers in each week’s tournament are rewarded with e-peen online fame points.

Overall I had a really great time with this game.  It looks and sounds great, the difficulty was mostly spot on and finally stringing together all the right sectors to win a race gave a great sense of accomplishment.  It’s just a great big shame about all those fucking bugs.

The Verdict:

Pros: Once you get yourself behind the wheel of a car and manage to keep the game running for more than five minutes there’s some fantastic fun to be had.  Plenty of cars, courses and challenges.  Online modes mean you can keep racing long after you conquer the career mode.

Cons: That’s a big “once” because of the bugs.  OH GOD, the bugs!  There’s just no excuse for them.  Some of the extra features haven’t really hit their mark either.

Overview: If all the bugs could be killed this would be a really great game.  Unfortunately they haven’t been and it really puts a downer on the whole experience.  Once it decides to run stably, however, it’s a fantastic game and racing fans will find a lot to like about it.  I’m deducting half a star for the bugs and giving it 4 out of 5.

* I had a very similar issue with Need For Speed: Shift, for example.  And that’s right, F1 2010, I’m looking at you with very high hopes.