Colin McRae’s “DIRT” (PC) Demo Review
Colin McRae’s “DIRT” had a PC demo version released on Thursday and I thought I’d write a quick post featuring my thoughts…
I am able to run it on my laptop as long as I use the “front bumper” camera or the “chase” camera. When I use the cockpit view my framerate drops low enough to make it undriveable. One thing I did notice with a low framerate is that like Geoff Crammond’s GP3 and 4, when the framerate lowers, so does the “playing speed” of the game itself.
Anyone who doesn’t have the game zipping along is actually losing out, the cars move slower but the clock moves in real-time. The recommended system specifications, or even the minimum specifications that this game requires are way, way too high. Flatout 2 (another racing game available on the PC) manages to create something almost as beautiful with much, much lower system specs.
The graphics are stunning though and that’s even more impressive when I consider that I have most of them turned off… The car bodies are nice looking and the visual damage appears to be both beautiful and functional - at last an arcade game that punishes the “wall rider”.
The physics are where I start to lose my smile on this one… DIRT is a lot of fun but it does have a few strange things that I noticed within minutes…
Drifting the cars (essential in rallying and dirt racing) is very difficult to do because the cars appear to have far too much grip. You also seem to be able to turn the car in mid-air and if you land with a car you’ve turned while jumping and wind up facing at a 90 degree angle to where you’re moving at, your wheels don’t snap off under lateral load. With such a “realistic” damage engine that I’d praise in many areas I have to say it seems the damage is “canned”. If you hit a tyre, you get tyre damage… It doesn’t matter how you hit the tyre.
The demo tracks are also quite strange because you have barriers and objects of the same sort reacting in different ways: One tyre barrier might bounce your car, another might have no effect (you can drive through it). Hopefully this is just something you can see with the demo track versions?
Like most racing games, “DIRT” will be a lot of fun and will in some areas add new features to the genre, but with that said, it isn’t going to give anyone a true to life simulation of rallying. You can download the demo from here. You can buy Flatout 2 from here
Tags: Codemasters, Colin McRae, DIRT, Flatout, Geoff Crammond, PC Games