The fourth DiRT game to come from Codemasters was out of the left field. A rally racing simulator turned arcade demolition derby? The truth of the matter is that the game is solid and is a lot of fun with friends. The single-player AI is frustrating and annoying, but after you finish these events for achievements, you won’t come back to it. Some people seem to be pretty harsh on the game, so let me stamp out a few fires here. It’s the AI that makes it feel like you have low top speed. The game has a very fast sense of speed, but Codemasters chose to use the much-hated “rubber-band AI.”.
There are several events you can play, such as 8-Ball, which reminded me of Hot Wheels’ Criss-Cross-Crash track set from when I was a kid. There are good ol’ demolition derbies and regular race-offs. There are no real-world cars available for these events, only in Gymkhana. I’m kind of torn with this event because I found it too difficult in DiRT 3, even with all the assists. I found it much easier this time around, but the only event I really liked was one where you had to smash down colored blocks in a certain order.
Other than that, the game is a standard DiRT affair. Beat the main event, play online, rinse, and repeat until you race yourself to boredom. I found playing online a ton of fun, but after a while, the novelty wears off, and you get sick of the game after a while. If Codemasters put some other gameplay elements in here to deter that, it wouldn’t be this way. From what we have, DiRT: Showdown is an extremely fun arcade racer with gorgeous visuals, but don’t expect to stay for too long.
Racing games are usually highly criticized because there is an overabundance of them. Everyone quickly pushes out the crappy racers and holds the good ones up high enough so everyone else can see through the overcrowded genre. DiRT 2 is an amazing rally simulator, and I don’t think there is another rally racer that does this better. The first thing DiRT fans will notice is the complete visual change from the last game. It uses a lot of elements from GRID and has a more Americanized visual attitude by using real-world famous drivers with voice clips to help you out. Gone are the more serious-style menus, and I kind of miss those. The virtual menu is pretty neat, though, which has you walking inside your tour bus for various options and outside to select your cars. It’s a neat idea, but the whole Americanized badassery with the drivers is a turn-off. Not to mention the voice clips are really annoying to hear over and over again, and there’s no option to turn them off.
Once you select a series of events (there are a ton of them) from one of the several areas around the world, you get to pick up your car. Each car has different stats, but you have to buy upgrade packs for different types of events. There are so many different types of cars for raids, rallies, races, trophy trucks, dude buggies, and the list goes on. You can’t upgrade your cars (still), but that is OK because you can now adjust settings such as downforce, gear ratio, suspension, etc. before the race starts (you will have to adjust these occasionally).
You can also select different liveries, rearview mirror toys, dashboard toys, and horns. These are to actually just show off the amazing physics engine, but it’s neat to see a toy dangling around in real-time physics on your dashboard and mirror. Once you hop into a race, you’ll notice the superb cockpit view that was revolutionized in the first game. Everything can be seen, not just your hands. You can look down and see your foot moving on the pedals, your hand shifting, and all the switches and parts of the interior. You can even see your screen swaying to your left in the Raid cars. It’s astounding how Codemasters got everything so detailed without having to have some sort of crazy hardware requirement.
When you’re actually racing, everything comes to life with the physics and sound design. You can hear rocks singing off your car, dirt scraping under your tires, water splashing up on the windshield, and your wipers kicking in and wiping it off. It all looks amazing and adds to the realism. Your car will get damaged in real-time, and dirt will stick and cling to the car as you drive. Depending on what difficulty you chose, you can view your replay at any time and rewind time, which was borrowed from GRID. This helps a lot during tough and long races. Sliding around and drifting around corners is all about skill, and that’s what’s so great about DiRT 2: that you win entirely based on your skill. The AI is also great since they will crash and go crazy when trying to catch up to you; they may even get totaled and have to drop out of the race altogether.
You never really get bored with the game because you’re always leveling up from the XP you earn in races (even completing “missions” such as jumping a certain height, etc.) and constantly unlocking new tracks, locations, and different event types. DiRT 2 also supports Windows Live and the Xbox 360 controller, which is great for people who love that. I want to give DiRT 2 a perfect score, but I wanted more than just racing-type events, and the sudden change in style really bothered me. I also wanted to be able to actually upgrade my cars and have more toys, liveries, and unlocks. There’s a very small amount, and that’s a little disappointing. The game can also be very hard thanks to such realistic physics where you’ll be retrying some events 20+ times to get first, but if you drop your difficulty too much, you won’t earn much money.
I highly recommend DiRT 2 for rally fans, racing fans, or anyone who just loves simulators. There’s enough here to make fans of the last game jump for joy, but some of the sudden changes will make them grumble in annoyance.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.