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Latest News Retrospective Return: Colin McRae Dirt | Retrospective Return: Colin McRae Dirt |
| Written by Adam Tewkesbury | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 15 January 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Retrospective Return is a look at older games to see whether they’re worth a revisit. Ranging from unknown gems to bargain bin failures, we’ll revisit any games that we think deserve it. 1) Do you like racing games? 2) Do you like racing games with more than just tarmac? 3) Do you enjoy racing games that, on occasion, frustrate you to the point of wanting to kill everyone remotely involved with the game? Yes to all? Get to the shops? 2 out of 3 isn’t bad… It seems silly to repeat what I’m sure everyone knows about Dirt. Yes, it has spectacular graphics, brilliant sound and a bewildering range of vehicles. Yes, the vehicle handling for each class of vehicle is pretty much spot on, even if buggies have rage-inspiring tendency to leap into the crowd for no reason on the last lap of a 4 lap race. And yes, it provides a globe-worth of tracks on which to test these vehicles. In short, Dirt provides the consummate off-road racing experience. For the discerning racer, what’s not to like? Generally, not a lot. Having played through the core career pyramid of events, the good definitely outweighs the bad. On occasion the course signposting can go awry resulting in a crash if you’d been ignoring your (usually very well informed) co-driver, but this is very rare and generally as much the fault of the driver as the game designer. The biggest disappointment for me was the tendency of the game to reset too quickly when you have a BIG accident (soaring off Pikes Peak, for example) but that probably belies my tendency towards arcade racers and certainly doesn’t detract from the serious task of getting from A-B as quickly as possible. And boy, do you ever go quickly! Unlock the 900+ horsepower Pikes Peak racers is akin to strapping yourself to a rocket propelled whippet, with my first few attempts ending abruptly at the first bend. The general rule is that the faster it goes, the quicker it breaks, and trust me on this, there is little in this world more awe-inspiringly frustrating as watching your wheels fly off on the last stage of a 10 stage rally, just because you cut a corner and clipped a tree stump. Worse than this, the game very rarely decides not to allow a corner to be cut, resulting in a reset to the point you left the track. This doesn’t happen often enough to become a real problem, however, and luckily never robbed me of a deserved win. So it is frustrating at times, but for the main the cars handle unbelievably well, and progress through the game is satisfyingly smooth. Not all events will suit all players (I’m yet to find a fan of buggy racing) but that’s the price of variety, and the end result is a hugely ambitious off-road cacophony, providing the thrills and spills of Motorstorm, bumper-to-bumper racing akin to TOCA/Forza, and a core rally experience to boot. Presentation is typically top drawer (the updated stats reporting your progress during loading screens are a particularly clever idea), and whilst I’d be hard pushed to call Dirt original, it certainly performs very well in all the key areas. Bargain! Retrospective Verdict: Arguebly still one of the best racing games to date. Buy it if you haven't already. Score: 8/10 
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