Superb off-road action in a slidey-sideways stylee
I’m starting to realise that there’s some people who just don’t get rally driving. Well, not just rally driving but any driving that involves going at suicidally fast speeds across loose surfaces with the car often not even remotely pointing in the direction its going. I used to do a bit of amateur driving back in the day and believe me, unless you keep your head down and concentrate on the pace notes, it can be a terrifying experience… as a bent suspension arm on a brand new Corsa will testify many years ago, not to mention my navigation light whanging me in the face and giving me two black eyes…Anyway, this adrenaline pumping mix of terror and excitement is always heftily diluted when rallying is translated into a PC or console game. Depending on the game it can be quite arcade-like where you basically ping the car off the roadside and just try and blast through as fast as possible, or you can spend hours learning the technical nature of throwing a car sideways on muddy gravel whilst trying to do as little damage to the car as possible.
In the past rally games have fallen firmly into one of those two camps but the Codesmasters have been racing games experts pretty much since the excellent TOCA first loaded up on PCs all those years ago and in each edition they’ve refined the racing experience until it’s near perfect. Then came the Colin McRae series which, though it came at a time when rally games seemed all the rage, stood out miles ahead of the rest.
Click for larger imageNow we’ve got Colin McRae DiRT, which is the latest instalment in the series and , if you’ve not read it already, you should take a look at Steven’s Xbox 360 review of Colin McRae DiRT which should pretty much tell you all you need to know.
So why are we doing a separate PS3 review? Well simply put, the PS3 version of Colin McRae DiRT is possibly one of the finest rally games you’ll ever see until Philips sort out amBX system that actually flings gravel, mud and dead flies at you as you drive.
Read on to see why.
