Dirt 4 Review — The Right Compromise
After the mediocre Dirt 3 and the quite unclear Dirt Showdown, the British from Codemasters significantly damaged their reputation. In attempts to please everyone, the games focused on casualness, which negatively affected the perception of the games by the devoted fans of the Colin McRae Rally series. Fortunately, they managed to rehabilitate in 2015 when a game with the simple name Dirt Rally was released. Offering players an engaging learning model, uncompromising driving difficulties, and the requirement for full concentration, the game managed to win the hearts of off-road enthusiasts. Now, a new numbered part of the series, Dirt 4, has appeared on the scene, promising to make a compromise between strict realism and casualness.
Instead of returning to the mainstream, Dirt 4 feels like the spiritual successor to the strict Dirt Rally, but with one significant difference: this time the game tries to please both veterans and newcomers and bridge the gap between the unattainable and the accessible.
This starts from the very beginning of the game, when you are offered two driving models to choose from: Gamer or Simulation. These are not just difficulty options, but two incomparable gameplay philosophies. In Gamer mode, playing becomes significantly softer, the car's braking distance is reduced, and the risk of losing control is minimized — even with careless use of the handbrake. The influence of certain types of weather and road surfaces is felt less pronounced. Add to this a driving academy that will teach you all the important aspects of rallying, and Dirt 4 becomes much more intuitive than its predecessor.
In Simulation mode, Dirt 4 turns into a game focused on efficiency and adaptability. You must be patient to learn when to press the gas to the floor and when to slow down. One minor miscalculation can cost you precious seconds. The feeling of fear and tension you experience in these moments makes you completely helpless and unprepared for what awaits you around the corner. By not taking risks, you can finish in the middle of the table; by taking risks, you can lose everything. It is this feeling — the realization that you are always on the edge — that makes Dirt 4 so desirable for veterans of true rallying.
Dirt 4 offers a familiar cycle of progress, gradually increasing in complexity. After a few starting races, when you earn enough money, you will have the opportunity to purchase your own cars and create your own racing team.
Management is a separate element of the game. By managing the team, you will hire mechanics and other team members, repair cars, and engage in their modernization. However, you will still spend most of your time on the track. The entire career is divided into four types: rally, landrush (short races on dirt roads), rallycross, and historical races.
If the first and last are more or less clear, let's consider the remaining types.
Landrush offers to ride in buggies, karts, and other automotive offspring on circuit maps filled with jumps and sharp turns. The large number of races and laps on the same track and the lack of variety in design personally make this type of race the most boring for me.
In RallyCross, you have the opportunity to compete in rally cars on officially licensed FIA World RallyCross tracks. The pace on these tracks is noticeably higher, so if you are looking for a break from serious rally stages, this energetic discipline might appeal to you.
But if you don't see yourself in any of these racing disciplines, there's no need to worry. The career mode is structured in such a way that you can easily ignore the type of races that don't interest you and focus solely on rallying.
The most significant innovation is the Your Stage tool, which allows you to create almost an endless number of unique rally segments with the press of a button. All you need to do is set the length of the track and the complexity, and then the game will generate a stage using one of its locations as a base. After that, you can adjust the time of day, weather, and similar elements. If you wish, you can share the created track with friends.
The graphical part of Dirt 4 hasn't made noticeable progress compared to the previous release and noticeably lags behind modern standards in elements concerning texture quality and draw distance. However, when it comes to effects, everything is in perfect order. Watching how dirt forms on the car's body, how it rises from under the wheels of the cars ahead, limiting the viewing distance, is pleasant, lively, and atmospheric.
DiRT 4 provides an excellent rally experience that everyone can customize to their liking. The visual aspect of the game is not what one would expect from a game in the current generation, but most importantly, the driving offers unforgettable feelings of tension and drive. Moreover, Codemasters has done an excellent job of adding a tool that helps you randomize routes and tracks almost infinitely.
