#Dirt 4 review pc series#

Turning assists off while in Gamer handling mode would feel like blasphemy of the highest order to racing purists out there, but the option is there if you feel like messing around/getting away with murder.

#Dirt 4 review pc series#

For those of you who are used to playing a DiRT game with the realism the series has come to be known for, I’d recommend keeping it on Simulation. For many more casual racing fans, this will be perfect. I could “feel” my car’s weight shift as I snaked around turns, and could tell when tires were losing grip if I took a corner too quickly.Ī lot of simulation cues are taken out of the Gamer handling model, almost turning the game into a straight-up arcade racer. I switched the handling model over to Simulation, and things immediately began to click. However, I paired this with the Gamer handling model, and couldn’t pull off some of the techniques described by the “ DiRT Academy”, the game’s decently in-depth set of tutorials. There are two different handling modes to choose from in DiRT 4 – “Gamer” and “Simulation.” After I ran through an initial tutorial stage, the game recommended I race at the “Pro” level of difficulty, which is approximately equal to a normal level.

This likely happens in real life, and adds just a nice extra bit to the believability of the game. One nice touch that I encountered during my time with DiRT 4 involved the communications in our helmets going out on rare occasion while in the thick of a stage. They also provide a few words of encouragement before and after events, depending on the physical state of your car or stage performance. They tend to give accurate directions, and when they call out the next feature of a stage can be tweaked to be earlier or later depending on your preferences. The co-driver mentioned earlier is a reliable partner, and a key component of your success in rally stages. To top things off, there are some choice audio tracks that play in your garage and in the game’s menus, though these tracks fade away once the racing starts. As a result, the engine audio became much more pronounced, its tortured squeal almost drowning out my co-driver’s calls. After some time, my hood came off the car, having been dislodged earlier. The rest of my run had been going pretty smoothly that stage, so rather than restarting, I decided to keep on going. I had misjudged a corner, and slammed fairly hard into a fence. One impressive example of this occurred to me during a later-stage event. An experienced racer’s ear can tell the health of their car by how she roars, and DiRT 4 sounds as realistic as they come. On the game’s higher difficulty settings, or with assists off, you’ll want to play the game with a surround sound system or a great pair of headphones. Draw distance for courses is essentially infinite, and you’ll always see the track ahead of you in plenty of detail, which is what matters more than anything else.Īudio is easily where DiRT 4 outshines its competitors. These graphics slip-ups are hardly deal-breaking, and of course most of the time you’re going to be flying by the scenery too quickly to really pay any mind to some lower-resolution texture off in the distance. A game with as varied of environments as DiRT could’ve also benefited from a High Dynamic Range (HDR) color gamut as well, but that too was left out.

While there are still dense forests, harsh, dry deserts, and freezing slopes to contend with, they just don’t impress the same way that they did in Rally. It’s odd to look at DiRT 4 after coming from DiRT Rally, because DiRT Rally’s environments were drop-dead gorgeous. Who knew dirt could look so appealing?Īll of this detail in the game’s cars apparently left little room for environmental details. As you race, your car will get dirty, and the level of detail even in a dirty car is admirable. There’s a ton of detail in each of the more than 50 cars on offer, combined with a realistic damage model that makes every crash believable and painful to look at. Right from the start, the first thing you’ll notice about DiRT 4 is that the car models are impeccable.