“Dirt Rally 2.0’s driving dynamics are a delight and it feels like low-speed handling has improved it seems easier to deliberately break traction on loose surfaces at slower speeds than before, allowing me to wind up the revs and better rotate certain cars on the throttle. The original Dirt Rally’s pad controls needed a bit of finessing back in the early days but it appears Codemasters has exorcised those gremlins. I quickened up my steering settings with the wheel because it felt a bit sluggish by default but changed nothing on the pad.
#DIRT 2 PC PRO#
Handle with CareI played on Xbox One X with a Thrustmaster TS-XW racing wheel and on PS4 Pro with a pad and the game is well suited to both. The effect seems less pronounced on a controller but the audio does a good job at translating a car struggling to get purchase on a chewed-up trail. Thick grooves of gravel will tug tyres to and fro, and with a wheel I really had to fight to keep my car pointed in a straight line on a heavily-disturbed surface, with grip at a premium. The further down the running order you start – all the way down to 150th – the more rutted and churned up the track surface will be.
There's plenty of gravel, though.Codemasters has also added surface degradation to the roads here, which adds an extra dimension to tackling particular stages, especially in Argentina and Australia. It does seem odd having a rally game without any snow or ice rallying out of the box, however. It’s a great set of locations and, with all due respect to the original Dirt Rally’s line-up of Monaco, Greece, Wales, Germany, Finland, and Sweden, Dirt Rally 2.0 is a lot less Eurocentric in this regard (taking players to four different continents as opposed to just the one). Spain is a totally tarmac-based affair, and Australia is a jump-filled journey framed with gum trees and cow paddocks. The USA features blitzes through damp, autumnal forests, while New Zealand’s aesthetic is rolling, coastal countryside. Argentina is defined by its snaking mountain trails and switchbacks framed by intimidating rock walls, while Poland is flatter and packed with straights where I can pin the throttle and let it rip.
#DIRT 2 PC SERIES#
To its credit, Dirt Rally 2.0’s stages are the best-looking in the series to date – especially in the wet – and each of the six countries represented are wonderfully distinct from one another. How that’s vastly inferior than running the same few stages and encountering the same shared sections indefinitely, however, is not clear to me. One of the criticisms of Your Stage was that it wasn’t long until it was clear you were just running over riffs of the same turns and junctions. Lighting changes and varied weather conditions notwithstanding, running repeatedly over the same ribbons of road quickly becomes sapping. “The downside, of course, is that sticking with pre-made stages means we’re back to having just a couple of long stages per location chopped up into segments to run forwards and backwards. It also means stages that more closely resemble actual rally locations admittedly you can’t necessarily rely on random chance to recreate roads that will remind rally fans of real-life rally stages. The gain with stages touched by artists rather than algorithms is that they do have noticeably more character and, being bespoke, there are numerous little idiosyncrasies and unique elements that you wouldn’t necessarily get from a computer stitching together a bunch of tweaked track tiles.
Dirt Rally 2.0 opts for handcrafted stages, like the first Dirt Rally. All the World’s a StageFailing to make the jump from Dirt 4 is the procedurally-generated stage system “Your Stage”, which I still think has a lot of promise. Dirt Rally’s reputation as Dark Souls on gravel remains intact. Crank it higher and you’ll need to be fast and faultless. At normal difficulty levels, however, it can be tough to top a timesheet after even a single mistake. At its weakest, the AI in Dirt Rally 2.0 can be soundly trounced even after making a big error or two, so the barrier for success has been lowered a bit. For players who were turned off by the first game’s ruthless AI, Dirt Rally 2.0 features a difficulty slider similar to the F1 series, rather than the several AI pre-sets included in the first game.
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