Recent reviews by ilvory

As a big fan of arcade racing stuff like NFS or Forza I was raped by this game really hard.

Not only I had to learn to drive from scratch but also it forced me to pay full attention to the game. That meant I couldn't watch movies on the background or talk to someone at the same time anymore.

DiRT Rally also made me fall in love with cockpit view. Even though I don't have a racing wheel and had to play with gamepad, it was still much easier to look at the track from inside the car (even controls somehow felt more responsive).

Never ever I was driving so slowly and accurately because damage system in this game is pretty realistic. You can't just hit the tree 10 times and then go to the next stage without any trace of impact. Every component have it's own "health bar" and have to be fixed when needed.

There is pretty cool upgrade system where you simply have to drive a particular amount of Kilometers/Miles in order to unlock a perk for your engineer or make your car lighter. Although sometimes it looks like a grind, if you just keep playing you'll eventually unlock everything you want.

After like 20 hours you start to feel that there is not so much content in this game and every championship just repeats the same tracks and gets longer everytime you get promoted. Spending 6 hours driving with the same bots can easily make you bored. And it is like that with every game mode: rally, rallycross, hillclimb.

After almost 30 hours, here are some tips for new players:
1. Disable assists like ABS and clutch in game preferences. It'll require a bit more control but also make you pass turns faster and prevent you from huge slow down after using handbrake (it also give you more money for disabling assists).
2. Don't reset your car if you fly off and you see the 15 seconds timer. It is always faster to go back on track by yourself wasting only 3-5 seconds rather that getting a massive penalty for reset.
3. If you don't know how to do settings for your car, use pre-made settings from workshop. This helped me a lot when I struggled to get a good time in Sweden location because of the snow. Someone's setup made me pass the stage like 20 seconds faster because the car literally stopped sliding.
4. Learn to understand pacenotes and listen carefully to your fellow co-driver. He can save your life :)

I'm now moving to DiRT Rally 2.0.
God help me.

Donnez-moi une suite au Ritz,
Je n'en veux pas
Des bijoux de chez Chanel,
Je n'en veux pas
Donnez moi une limousine,
J'en ferais quoi

The economy is dead. There is never enough money for anything. Pay to participate in the race, pay for repairs between races, pay your team every week. As a result, having won in some semi-final for 35k dollars, you get a maximum of 20k (if the difficulty is not lowered, money is also withdrawn for this). And you still need to buy new cars and upgrade them somehow.

There are contracts, but they either pay 2 pennies, or the condition is extremely hard and long to complete. Sometimes you still have to go through some kind of test drive for the contract to be activated. Nobody says how long this test drive will take, but after you fail it, the right time appears. Brilliant.

Bots in regular races are easy, but in championships at the same difficulty (which cannot be lowered below 50%) almost overtake you by a lap, which makes rallies and v-rallies simply impassable until you buy the most expensive car and upgrade it fully.

Points are distributed so randomly. Out of 6 races I took 5 first places and 1 second. And in the end, I still received second place for the whole championship. Awesome.

Passing this ♥♥♥♥ again takes half a day of life. One championship has about 6 races. Each 4-6 laps. You can really spend an hour on it, not getting any pleasure from gameplay, because races are repetitive and most importantly BORING.

Physics is also bad. In no other game do you slide like that on the off-road. And when it crashes, it will either glue you or spit you out 10 meters into the sky (this is how I got the achievement for 5 barrel rolls).

Well, as an icing on the cake - disconnected servers, although the game is not even five years old.

I can't count how many times I had to restart the race because flashbacks simply didn't work 90% of the time. And bots were extremelly challenging even on easy difficulty.

But the rest of the game was fire.

It's a pity racing games like this are getting mercilessly removed from the store.