DiRT is an off-road simulation driving game. It's easy to use and offers a good challenge to those already familiar with driving games as well as to the new player. The options it offers give the player the ability to set difficulty for each and every race they drive — thus, no more annoying restarts halfway through the game when it suddenly becomes too difficult.
For the new player, you can just start and drive by choosing your difficulty level and which race you'd really like to run. You can take as long to finish the career pyramid as you'd like, or if you're already familiar with driving games, you can rush through it as quickly as you want. There are four levels of difficulty, ranging from novice to expert. Each level of difficulty — besides giving the computer opponents better artificial intelligence and reflexes — acts as a financial setting, allowing you to eventually buy new vehicles and upgrades to your team. Further adding to the value of a competitive racing simulation, there also is the ability for more experienced players to alter almost any component of the car. Want to try and drive a race with your front steering out of alignment? The game will let you do it; however, you'll have to know what parts of the car are the front steering and what those parts actually affect. If you haven't the knowledge of what the various parts do, then it's more of gamble to find out what does what with the vehicle settings.
DiRT is very pretty, with the cars and environment lushly detailed — not that you see much careening around at 100 MPH or so. I also noticed as you take damage, the car starts to lose parts and takes on visibly representative damage, too.
Sound — well it's all there, from the revving of the engines to the various sounds you'll hear as your drive through the environment and as pieces of your car come off. I'd like to point out at this moment that if you hear a guy yelling "left 45," this means to turn left at a 45-degree angle. The voice that gives these driving hints is mostly clear but tends to fade into the background noise as you are driving.
Gameplay — well, there's quite a bit here. Control is achieved by the two small control sticks on the control pad.
There's a couple of negative issues with this game at the moment — one being load times. While the loading screens are quite informative about the game and the racing environment, it takes several minutes for the race to actually load. Compared to any other PlayStation 3 game I've played, this is quite excessive.
Another thing I really missed was the ability to watch your car bounce around, roll end over end, until you ended up as a small metal brick against some tree. Unfortunately in this game, shortly after you leave the road, you'll find yourself back on the track. Giving players the option of watching some of the truly astounding crashes that can occur in such a game would have been a nice touch. Unlike other racing games that have a playback feature, there is no such thing in the game, so you'll have no way to savor those really cool moves you've just completed.
Lastly, while I realize that "multiplayer" is slowly moving away from the home, there is no single machine multiplayer available. The screen size that a single player gets is more than adequate to view the various races as you zip through the game. A splitscreen option would have been nice, especially for those who have more then one player at their home. You can have multiplayer via LAN or on the Internet, but those of us who don't have access to more then one PS3 (and HDTV for that matter) are sadly out of luck.
While I enjoyed watching and playing DiRT, I won't be returning to it. It's not a bad game, I'm just not a car-racing aficionado — I'd much rather be driving around blowing stuff up than racing for the pure joy of it. Regardless of the setting or vehicle, if it doesn't have guns that I can strap to the hood, I'm not likely to see much time on it.
If you're an off-road racing fan, I'm sure you'll get plenty of enjoyment out of DiRT — and enjoy racing those vehicles that are not quite standard.
Got started in the gaming industry with the beta for Asheron’s call. From there I’ve pretty much done a huge amount of beta’s for the industry. I’ve beta’d games, worked in customer service for games – been a game cop (kinda like a higher level gm…), written articals for games, about games, hint’s and tips for games.
It’s probably pretty safe to say that I have either beta’d or played every MMRPG game that has come out onto the market since 1999 – And I’ve played muds, moo’s and mush’s as well. My likes about the game industry. Oh so much creativity! So little time. Dev’s doing what they say they will. Hmm, What else do I like about games. Well, I do like to explore… Some dislikes. Well, I really, really hate buggy games. Especailly buggy games that are actually really interesting. There’s nothing worse then having this super-hyped game that’s groundbreaking in many new ways – only to have it unplayable due to stupid little bugs that should have been cleared up waaaay before release.
