There’s an historical rally series racing in four eras in the free play mode, too. Two dozen of the 50 cars in the Dirt Rally 2.0 fleet are historical varieties spanning 1964 to 1999. In one (Portugal’s Montalegre), the ruts carved by five races through a sweeping curve at the end almost lock me up, making it a legitimate struggle to get to a cleaner section on the inside.
I see this - or rather, feel it - the most on the dirt portions of a rallycross course. The surface is also dynamically shifting and degrading. A wobbling wheel is going to thwart a lot of cornering plans.
Some of this is because the damage modeling isn’t just for looks or variety in the race notes. Even at medium difficulty levels, a single mistake, misread of directions, or just plain bad luck will be enough to drop me to the middle third of the field. I remember a rather curt difficulty spike like this in Dirt 4, too. That’s fortunate, because the lack of onboarding portends a very difficult game to run competitively, once the player graduates from the “open” rank to Clubman in My Team. It feels like all my other mini-victories in sports video games - a great through-ball in FIFA, or setting up a hitter for a swinging strikeout away in MLB The Show - that make their staple tasks delightful and not repetitive. The payoff when I can maintain my momentum, keep my wheels spinning, and rocket out of a turn (to then take advantage of the slight corner cut ahead that my co-driver calls out) is wholly affirming. While Dirt Rally 2.0 does little to onboard new players (there is no driving school, like in Dirt 4), it doesn’t take long for me to find a feel for countersteering with the slippery 1972 Lancia Fulvia HF, the first rally car in the My Team career mode. That equitable treatment is what kept me coming back late into the night, racing something else from the game’s prix-fixe menu of rallies and rallycross events.
While going all-out is necessary for long stretches or shallow turns, I never felt like Dirt Rally 2.0 expects me to drive flawlessly at maximum speed all the time, as lesser racing games tend to do.ĭirt Rally 2.0’s officially licensed FIA World Rallycross Championship series promises hair-raising action - provided you’re not driving more car than you can handle. The car seems more manipulable at slower paces, which rewards more conservative driving or a focus on simply keeping wheels on the road. It’s usually found somewhere in the blend of tire choice and wear (both new to the game), surface degradation, and the weight and turning radius of the car, of course. It feels like there is more than one way to solve a 4-turn that sharpens into a 2, or those hairpins carved through bare granite in Argentina’s mountains. Sliding through the turns, I am feeling for the edges of a safe speed with every sense I have, including my ass.īut even if Dirt Rally 2.0 lives up to its namesake ancestor, 2015’s Dirt Rally, in how much it demands of the driver, I don’t find it to be tough-as-nails for the sake of it. I was tensing up through every switchback and square turn, trying to will my Peugeot 280 R2 back from the brink of an unguarded shoulder somewhere in Spain. Each car’s handling has such a personality that their manipulation seems to extend beyond the controller’s inputs. I take that for granted from Codemasters, whose Dirt 4 I adored and whose F1 series has become an obsession. There is more than a distinct feel to each of its 50 cars, or even how they perform on three different surfaces, whether wet or dry. Was it yesterday’s hike? The weighted blanket I sleep under? My cheap desk chair? This weekend I became aware of the fact that my ass was really sore, and I had no idea why.
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