Landrush and Rallycross, on the other hand, use bespoke tracks with a number of different layouts, with the latter featuring tracks and locations that cropped up in Dirt Rally. It feels like there’s a big step up from Challenging difficulty, which isn’t all that challenging, to Demanding and Tough difficulties, with the latter fairly consistently out of my reach. All you see of them is a little triangle moving along the progress bar, but they seem able to race ahead down any of the perilously bumping straight sections that crop up, though this could equally be my inability to live up to the game’s ‘Be Fearless’ tagline. I’m also somewhat sceptical of the calculated pace of the AI. There is, however, a sense of déjà vu at times, as I notice some rather familiar dips, turns and hairpins that feel eerily similar to one another. It really pushes you to race what’s in front of you instead of learning a stage by rote, trying to absorb the co-pilot’s instructions – which never skip a beat – reading the road and reacting to the hazards you face. There’s no rewinding time, as has featured in so many Codemasters games of the last decade, and only limited restarts depending on your difficulty settings. The way Codemasters have built the game around Your Stage leads to a fundamental shift in how you play. In Free Play, in the career, in the multiplayer, it’s in every rally in the game. You might also wonder where it actually is in the game, as it hides away without a mention in the game’s menus. In truth, you have only a cursory input though deciding a level’s length and complexity, making it something of a misnomer, but it works fantastically well. Where Dirt Rally featured dozens of stages across six locations, Dirt 4 is underpinned by the Your Stage system that can effortlessly generate new and unique stages for you to hurtle along. It is obviously at its best with simulation handling and a racing wheel in hand, though. There’s an awful lot more granularity to the options beyond this, letting you find the right balance of difficulty for you, with a greater bonus to experience the higher you set it. The latter has an awful lot in common with Dirt Rally’s handling model, while the former takes these foundations and tones it down, making it more forgiving and edging it closer to the difficulty of the last numbered game, if not its particular handling. One of the first things you see when you load up the game is the choice between ‘Gamer’ and ‘Simulation’ handling. ![]() ![]() In that regard it succeeded and it fundamentally altered the course of Dirt 4’s development. Dirt Rally was an outstanding example of this racing discipline, taking the series back to its Colin McRae roots, but it was also a proof of concept, an internal experiment to show that rallying could be hardcore and popular at the same time. After years in the wilderness – I like to imagine a lone, dusty Subaru Impreza trundling through the Australian Outback like a modern day Herbie – Dirt is back in a big way.
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