DiRT Rally might not quite be the game you were expecting. While previous games in the series have had a bit of an American off-road feel and focused squarely on arcade-style racing, DiRT Rally gives a driving experience that's much more faithful to the nailbiting technical difficulty of true rally driving.
The game has a brand new physics engine and uses it to really push the user. The difficulty curve earned a bit of a reputation for its toughness on Steam Early Access, and it hasn't been softened up here. The various stages throw a plethora of different challenges at players, substantially affecting the gameplay and forcing drivers to adapt to the particular conditions of every level. Germany, for example is littered with rocks that mean even attempting to cut a corner amounts to a hail mary pass, while hay bales make difficult chicanes of even straight sections of roads. Sweden, meanwhile, has not only slick icy roads but also deep snowdrifts lining the track.
To make matters even tougher, damage is persistent between races. You can sacrifice time for repairs made on the fly by your team, but that could mean the difference between setting the best time on a course and bombing out.
This is a different kind of DiRT - one that brings the precision seen in road-racing sims to wild off-road tracks!
