Dirt Rally 2.0 Review

By Luke Reilly

Dirt Rally 2.0 is a first-rate return to the more serious side of Codemasters’ off-road catalogue. It may be hot on the heels of Dirt 4 – with a couple of tricks pulled from its friendlier stablemate – but make no mistake: Dirt Rally 2.0 reasserts this spin-off series’ reputation as the premier rally simulator of the modern era.

Dirt Rally 2.0 is designed primarily for hardboiled rally enthusiasts and returning fans, so new players may struggle initially. The original Dirt Rally was eventually augmented with a pile of tutorial videos in time for its jump from PC to console, and Dirt 4 features a fully-fledged Dirt Academy training mode set within the sprawling DirtFish Rally School – a real-life facility based in the US Pacific Northwest. But there’s none of that here in Dirt Rally 2.0. It’s a case of learn on the job or perish.

For players who were turned off by the first game’s ruthless AI, Dirt Rally 2.0 features a difficulty slider similar to the F1 series, rather than the several AI pre-sets included in the first game. At its weakest, the AI in Dirt Rally 2.0 can be soundly trounced even after making a big error or two, so the barrier for success has been lowered a bit. At normal difficulty levels, however, it can be tough to top a timesheet after even a single mistake. Crank it higher and you’ll need to be fast and faultless. Dirt Rally’s reputation as Dark Souls on gravel remains intact.

All the World’s a Stage

Failing to make the jump from Dirt 4 is the procedurally-generated stage system “Your Stage”, which I still think has a lot of promise. Dirt Rally 2.0 opts for handcrafted stages, like the first Dirt Rally. The gain with stages touched by artists rather than algorithms is that they do have noticeably more character and, being bespoke, there are numerous little idiosyncrasies and unique elements that you wouldn’t necessarily get from a computer stitching together a bunch of tweaked track tiles. It also means stages that more closely resemble actual rally locations; admittedly you can’t necessarily rely on random chance to recreate roads that will remind rally fans of real-life rally stages.

The downside, of course, is that sticking with pre-made stages means we’re back to having just a couple of long stages per location chopped up into segments to run forwards and backwards. Lighting changes and varied weather conditions notwithstanding, running repeatedly over the same ribbons of road quickly becomes sapping. One of the criticisms of Your Stage was that it wasn’t long until it was clear you were just running over riffs of the same turns and junctions. How that’s vastly inferior than running the same few stages and encountering the same shared sections indefinitely, however, is not clear to me.

To its credit, Dirt Rally 2.0’s stages are the best-looking in the series to date – especially in the wet – and each of the six countries represented are wonderfully distinct from one another. Argentina is defined by its snaking mountain trails and switchbacks framed by intimidating rock walls, while Poland is flatter and packed with straights where I can pin the throttle and let it rip. The USA features blitzes through damp, autumnal forests, while New Zealand’s aesthetic is rolling, coastal countryside. Spain is a totally tarmac-based affair, and Australia is a jump-filled journey framed with gum trees and cow paddocks. It’s a great set of locations and, with all due respect to the original Dirt Rally’s line-up of Monaco, Greece, Wales, Germany, Finland, and Sweden, Dirt Rally 2.0 is a lot less Eurocentric in this regard (taking players to four different continents as opposed to just the one). It does seem odd having a rally game without any snow or ice rallying out of the box, however.

Codemasters has also added surface degradation to the roads here, which adds an extra dimension to tackling particular stages, especially in Argentina and Australia. The further down the running order you start – all the way down to 150th – the more rutted and churned up the track surface will be. Thick grooves of gravel will tug tyres to and fro, and with a wheel I really had to fight to keep my car pointed in a straight line on a heavily-disturbed surface, with grip at a premium. The effect seems less pronounced on a controller but the audio does a good job at translating a car struggling to get purchase on a chewed-up trail.

Handle with Care

I played on Xbox One X with a Thrustmaster TS-XW racing wheel and on PS4 Pro with a pad and the game is well suited to both. I quickened up my steering settings with the wheel because it felt a bit sluggish by default but changed nothing on the pad. The original Dirt Rally’s pad controls needed a bit of finessing back in the early days but it appears Codemasters has exorcised those gremlins.

Dirt Rally 2.0’s driving dynamics are a delight and it feels like low-speed handling has improved; it seems easier to deliberately break traction on loose surfaces at slower speeds than before, allowing me to wind up the revs and better rotate certain cars on the throttle. It can be incredibly demanding but it’s also a lot of fun. Tyre wear is also now simulated and it’s something I really noticed after trying to survive one too many 10-minute Spanish stages on soft rubber.

Dirt Rally 2.0’s garage includes quite a few familiar faces from Dirt Rally and Dirt 4, plus an expanded R5 class, which ought to please fans of more modern machinery. A particular highlight is the new R-GT class, particularly with the original Dirt Rally’s rear-wheel drive Group B cars absent from this sequel (at least for now; an Opel Manta 400 and BMW M1 are scheduled to arrive as DLC in April). In real-life R-GT is a tarmac-based cup for production GT cars but Dirt Rally 2.0 unleashes these beasts on mud and gravel. At first glance it may seem a little absurd to tackle loose surface rallies in high-horsepower, rear-wheel drive V8s, but in practise it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Throttle control is key here; with the right amount of beans only small steering inputs are necessary to negotiate corners. It’s a delicate dance. Oh, and they sound fantastic.

The audio elsewhere is typically brilliant, from the pops and farts and belches of engines running rich to the wheel noise and kick-up as you careen over all the different surfaces, though I did crank the latter up a bit from its default level. Veteran co-driver Phil Mills’ pace notes are clear and robust but, while they do get more stressed at higher speeds, a little more banter concerning my efforts (good or poor) would be great. His post-race chat is a bit flat, too.

Dirty Talk

Career mode, or My Team, is similar to the original Dirt Rally, tasking players with building a garage and a team. It’s a little shallower than Dirt 4, which rolled in sponsorships and team liveries and such, and for some reason you’ll need to be online to access it. I understand why being online is a requirement to access the daily and weekly asynchronous challenges against other Dirt players, but why single-player progression is tied to it isn’t clear. This could be a problem if connectivity is an issue.

Career mode is a bit stingy with cash but there’s also a collection of standalone championships you can dive straight into like a driver for hire, which is a decent concession to those with less time to grind and micromanage. The official World RX series is included here to immediately dive into, also. Eight tracks are featured, and Catalunya, Silverstone, and Mettet make their debut here. I still love the format but I will say that, after two previous games and several years, we probably don’t need Neil Cole to tell us what a Joker lap is before every race anymore.