Returning To Codemasters’ Roots In DiRT Rally

It’s been a long time since Codemasters last made a rallying game, and I’m not just talking about Dirt 3 from four years ago. The Dirt series as a whole has seen a marked shift to include other racers, circuits and even gymkhana, culminating in Dirt: Showdown, with the actual rallying feeling more and more marginalised. The last game they made with ‘Rally’ in the title and nothing but rallying within was Colin McRae Rally 2005. As I said, it’s been a long time.

Dirt Rally redresses this, releasing into Steam’s Early Access programme last week as a PC exclusive, at least until a final launch. Its graphical roots in the aging EGO 3 engine – compared to F1 2015’s EGO 4 – are clear to see, but the graphics are really just window dressing to a game which takes the series back to its roots and back to the purity of a driver and co-driver trying to navigate some perilously difficult stages.

With plans to add more and more content over time, and partly off the back of community feedback that they receive, there’s already a rather decent number of stages to battle your way through. Spread across Monte Carlo, Greece and Wales, the 36 stages encompass everything from tarmac, snow and ice to gravelly sun-baked hillsides. There’s a similar paucity of cars on offer, with just a handful from each of the included eras – 60s, 70s, 80s, Group B, Group A and 2010s – for a total of 17 cars. Then again there are already some of the most iconic cars from rallying history, with several generations of Lancia and Ford and a natural focus on the sport’s Group B heyday.

Add all of that together in the various different permutations and you can already get a decent impression of where the game is heading. The cars feel tight and responsive, without the kind of floaty handling that has marked a number of recent Codemasters games, and that makes them all a real joy to drive, especially when you have the assists turned off and really pit yourself against the environs. If you’re desperate to get into the nitty gritty of a car’s handling, you can delve into a variety of tuning options.

Yet, regardless of the car that you pick, the stages that you face are hard as nails. They twist and turn, they bump you around, you have to position yourself correctly over bumps and deal with the reduced visibility of night time, rain and snow. All too often, I found myself clipping the rough verges and kicking my car up into the air or braking too late and sending myself off the side of the trail and into the dense trees, and there’s a real struggle to stay in control, especially as you switch from the older cars to the newer, more powerful ones.

Your treks across the terrain are guided by your co-pilot, in true rally game style, with each turn and hazard preceded by just a few seconds with a line of dialogue about what’s ahead. It’s particularly fluid and natural feeling in nature, as he goes from seamlessly stringing together five or six quick fire instructions about a tightening curve with a rock on the inside that you need to avoid – and you had better listen if he tells you not to cut a corner, unless you want to send your car flying – to feeling as though he’s very nearly stumbled mid-instruction. It brings an excellent human touch to his direction.

Admittedly, this is  all wrapped up in just the loose framework of a full game. Though you can play whatever you like within a custom event, the career mode has you saving up to buy cars from each era and unlock their respective championships, which each pass through the three locations and a selection of the stages on offer, as well as championships for four different difficulty levels. Naturally, the Mini Cooper and Lancia Fulvia from the 60s are the only two cars that come under your initial 50,000 credit budget, and it does take a while to save up to buy later cars.

Hindering you slightly in your quest for more vehicles is a lack of the flashback system that was first introduced in the original Dirt, meaning that you can only restart a stage entirely if you’re dissatisfied with how a particular run is going, rather than rewind time to before your accident. However, that drains 1,000 credits from a pool of 5,000 awarded for not doing so, leaving you with a tricky decision on whether that particular off or resetting to track – which adds 10 or more seconds to the clock each time – has cost you positions.

Vehicle damage is also tracked for a dozen or so parts, with their health descending from 100% down to 0%, depending on how badly you’ve behaved yourself while driving. The final bill comes out of your funds, but you can also repair parts of your choosing between stages in a rally. Each percent of health takes time out of the 30 minutes allotted for repairs, so you’ll have to choose wisely, but you can also increase the amount of work you can do by adding better engineers to your team.

A team boss and up to four engineers can back you up at a rally, and it’s up to you to get the best people you can afford, each of which have different strengths and weaknesses, when it comes to repairing your car. Along with the oddity of being able to fix a radiator by 1%, this is really the early framework of a more in depth system, which Codemasters will doubtless be working to improve over time.

Dirt Rally is off to a really great start, though. The car handling is tight and responsive, the rallying devilishly tricky and there are plenty of encouraging signs of what’s yet to come, with things like the Hill Climb mode placeholder already displayed in the menus. Dirt is returning to its roots, and it’s all the better for it.