Dirt Rally - Console Impressions

It usually happens with racing games. Extreme realism in simulators (physics, handling, etc) can often be off-putting for people just looking for fun. However, in some cases a great representation of the real thing is where you find the most fun, and this is something especially true with Dirt Rally. It's demanding, it's deep, it can be frustrating... but damn, no-one has ever done such a good job of depicting how it feels to rush through woodland at high speed, to drift precariously on ice, and jump over crests at 150 Km/h.

Our resident racing expert, Petter Hegevall, defined it as "the most realistic rally game of all time" when he reviewed the PC game back in December. Now we've been testing the PS4 build of the game (which launches on April 5 along with Xbox One version), with a Thrustmaster racing wheel + pedals + Playseat set, and we can say "hey, we crashed a lot, but it was a hell of a ride and now we want more, much more".

For here you can feel what the four tires are doing, when you lose grip or when you step on the gas too hard. This is very, very different from a tarmac-based racing simulator such as Assetto Corsa, and this is only possible because the dev tem have put a ton of the effort - most of it, in fact - into the terrain and physics model, which is as it must be in the rally genre. We won't delve deeper into their achievements as they're perfectly explained in the linked PC review, but we have to say every single system seems intact ahead of this console release. And that is pretty exciting.

During our session at Koch Media's offices in Madrid, given we're not racing experts, we can honestly say that we didn't do too well. We often ended up crashing into trees or rocks, or cracking the windscreen embarrassingly early on, or slipping about the track too much. But hey, being the first is not the goal here (good track times are), and we noticed we were improving at a steady pace, and the frustration was lessened due to the feedback we were getting from the wheel. It feels so natural (and fun), which inspires you to learn more and to give it your best.

And in this regard - again, rally racing is different to circuit races in terms of grip, changing terrain, turns, drifting, leaps, timing... - those who are daunted can rely on the twenty-one new tutorials created for the occasion. These aren't the usual "see a demo, try a challenge yourself" interactive lessons, but an in-game video showing how things work and a professional voice-over explaining the concepts. It might sound shallow, but it turned out to be really interesting. For instance, we watched the "how to approach crests and leaps" video, and the things we learned about this exciting sport, and finding out more about how the car reacted and handled, meant we were looking forward to improving even more when back on the track and racing again. Because, you know, you can't control the wheels mid-air, but perhaps you can break a bit before taking off, balance the weight of the vehicle, and then even land with a turn in order to face the next obstacle as announced by your copilot's pace notes.

So far the game looks and feels pretty much the same as its PC counterpart. We played it in 1080p and at 60 frames-per-second on PS4 (the accompanying PS4 gameplay was taken with a debug unit, so compression and framerate are not representative, but you can get an idea of the graphics), and the game will implement an interesting approach to resolution on Xbox One: instead of knocking the whole thing down to 900p, it does so only where needed due to hardware demands. We already knew that the graphics weren't top-tier regarding car models and effects, because the terrain and physics simulation takes such a huge toll, but the sense of speed is great and the visual whole is beautiful as it is.

Before leaving, after driving for about half an hour and hearing chief game designer Paul Coleman talking about concepts such as "real roads" or "surface depth simulation", we asked the rally-lover from Codemasters to give it a go and get behind the wheel. And that was the last thing we needed in order to really get us looking forward to this game: seeing what you can do after hours and hours of rally racing, witnessing how Coleman was dancing on the track like a pro driver - all the while looking incredibly relaxed - got everyone present excited.

The driving experience we had saw us take control of a couple of cars on a couple of tracks, but the full game will come backed with a significant amount of content to rally through. This includes customisation, tweaking & repair options, team management, 39 iconic cars, 6 rallies with more than 70 tracks, World Rallycross licensed content, new Classic Mini and Super 1600 classes, Pikes Peak gravel circuit, references and nods to legends such as Colin McRae (of course, given the heritage of the series - it also includes a Blu-ray documentary) and Sebastien Loeb.

So, with content parity also promised between PC and consoles (and vice-versa, as PC will get all new console features at launch via a free update), and full RaceNet support for online features (friend and community leagues, weekly and monthly challenges), we reckon we only need to try the final offering on both PS4 and Xbox One for a decent amount of time in order to confirm our suspicions: this looks like it's going to be the best rally game of all time on consoles as well, starting April 5.