Colin McRae: DiRT review

It's been a quiet old time for rally games.

The last significant one was Richard Burns Rally, which is a couple of years old now and so brutally tough that it was too much like hard work for a lot of people. Though the latest McRae mercifully sticks to its more accessible guns, it too has upped the authenticity.

It's rather smart in how it does it, though. Rather than making its cars uncontrollable bucking broncos, it's the roads that have been rethought in Colin McRae: DiRT. You are presented with a double-whammy of remarkable graphics and intense physics, which makes the gravel, tarmac or dirt tracks look and feel like the uneven, shifting and treacherous surfaces they're supposed to be. The effects are great, and the game forces you to control your computer car in a far more realistic way.

While in most cases this means a harder race, it is a much more satisfying one, and it is a huge leap on for rally gaming. Rallying is supposed to be you versus the road, and now it really is. Still, DiRT marks a move away from McRae's traditional lone rallying into being a much broader driving game. It offers a wide selection of head-to-head race modes, and it has enough polish to pull it off. There's also an attempt to make DiRT more appealing to the rally layman by throwing in gimmick races such as dune buggies and big rigs. These are loads of fun, but don't feel anywhere near as well realised as the more serious stuff.

Unfortunately, there's pretty much no multiplayer mode to speak of. You can race other players online, but all you will see of them is a name on a scoreboard. It's a sad omission for what is otherwise rally gaming's finest hour. This is not a game that any driving fan should miss out on. It's an amazing leap forward, well and truly leaving behind all those other racers that think a road need only be a flat strip of static pixels.