 Title: Dirt 2Release Date: September 8, 2009
Genre: Racing
Rating: T for Teen
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Warner Home Video Games
Developer: Codemasters
Fall of 2009 is a wonderful time for fans of the racing genre. At least four major racing games are being released for multiple consoles; Dirt 2, Need For Speed: Shift, Gran Turismo for PSP and Forza Motorsports 3. You could probably even throw Indianapolis 500 Evolution in there, though I don’t plan on reviewing that one. The first of this series of releases is Dirt 2, an off-road simulation racer and the sequel to the very popular Dirt, which was released in June of 2007.
Dirt 2’s career mode is set up inside of a camper. You walk inside and look around to view different things you can do. A map lying on the table has different locations plotted out, each of which offers a number of races. There are about 10 different locations with a few courses at each. The vehicle collection is pretty big, with multiple categories and car selections inside that category. One thing that bothered me about career mode is your inability to skip the videos. Especially right when you first start the game, you have to set through a few minute long video that just shows cars driving around tracks, nothing you absolutely have to see are shown here, but you still cannot skip it. Then there are short videos between races that just show and scan the area around your camper, as if you were standing and looking around. These also cannot be skipped.
Dirt 2 is visually beautiful. The front end presentation is very good. The music is a fitting blend of contemporary. The cars are rendered nearly identical to their real life counterparts and environments are vast and breath-taking. There were a couple times when I was playing and the visuals would get very trippy on me. What happened is a lot of background surfaces, such as building walls, mountains and rocks, will all switch to the same advertisement graphic. It’s kind of hard to describe, but just imagine every surface in your house, besides the floor and ceiling, with a two foot by two foot Taco Bell logo covering them, it was very distracting. The controls are polished and tight, power-sliding around corners on gravel tracks feels exhilarating. The difficulty is interesting; there are multiple levels of difficulty that can be changed in between races. This is quite fitting since I’ve found that the different vehicle categories often take different difficulty levels to be competitive. I also encountered a couple instances when the game would freeze up while loading, I only had this a few times though, so it’s something you have to worry about constantly happening, like in Madden 10.
Tracks are mostly made of dirt and loose gravel and weave through hilly environments in between trees and rocks. There is a pretty cool effect where you will be able to see tire treads in the loose gravel. Even though this is cool looking, the vehicles do not behave as if it were that absorbent. It looks like kitty-liter but your car handles as if it were a tightly packed dirt road. The track’s boundaries are often guardrails, plastic orange fencing and bails of hay. This is where the game really takes a dip in realism. I find it extremely hard to believe that a two-high stack of hay bails can stop a truck traveling at 75 mph as if it were made out of cardboard.
This game has an awesome characteristic that all racing games should adapt, Flashbacks. Flashbacks are the ability to rewind a certain amount of time so you can retry an area you performed poorly on. No longer will you have to restart a long race just because you got distracted by something when entering the final corner. Their only problem comes when doing rally races, your co-pilot doesn’t rewind with everything else so you will have to rely on your memory for the last few corners you rewound through.
Dirt 2 is available for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. This is a pretty good off-road racer. It’s a nice combination of simulation and arcade that would be easy for a newbie or an experienced racer to pick up and play. It’s great as a rental, but you should wait for the price to go do down to around $40 before making the purchase.
October 26, 2009
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