Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Immersive"

If you're into rallying please don't let the dreadful reviews of this great game put you off. I don't know why all reviewers seem to rate the DiRT series above this one. Don't get me wrong, horses for courses, etc, but personally i don't like all the flashy American "awesome dude!" stuff you get in DiRT 2 and 3, and i have no interest in racing Baja bugs or karts, or trucks or any other stuff around. i like rallying. Just rallying. The point-to point stuff...not the lappy -cross version (I did spend many a happy moment playing that discipline on DiRT2 but only because the Rally stages were too short!). This is a very good game. The graphics are miles better than WRC and WRC2, but the feeling of speed is so great in this game you'll be looking so far ahead that you won't have time to notice. Yes, the cars feel a little light, but they feel no lighter than they do in the DiRT games. The way the cars move around is very realistic, and frankly i'm happy than 1 missed braking point, or an over-enthusiastic tug on the hand-brake can mess your time up and force a re-run (i turned off that "flashback" thing as soon as i loaded the game up). Good. That's the way it should be. Also, a lot of the many stages (i think there are 13 locations, and 5 or 6 stages in each) are quite long, up to around 6 or 7 kilometres, so you can quite easily spend 4 minutes or so on a single stage, which is miles better than the 1 1/2 minute stages on the latest DiRT game and means that each stage is a lot more immersive that on those games. It's not a sim, like the old (and, for my money, greatest) rally game, Colin McRae Dirt (the first one), but it's certainly closer to that than it is to being a Sega Rally arcade game. If you like proper point-to-point British / European rallying, get this game. It's enormous fun, looks great and is very realistic.