DigitalBattle.com

As comedian / ventriloquist Jeff Dunham once put it, NASCAR is basically about going fast and turning left.  It’s not too hard to wonder how a racing game, especially one like Dirt, can be one of those games that makes you wonder how a simple racing game can be so spectacularly complex.

There isn’t really a plot involved with Dirt–you’re an offroad sort of racer that competes in a series of races for points, advancing steadily through the ranks of the track drivers and eventually making it all the way to the very top.  Prize purses for these races are obscene–winning the first prize on the very easiest level of the very first race is a hundred and fifty grand for maybe two minutes of work.

And when I said “complex”, I definitely meant it.  Before I even got to my first race, a short little hop on some dirt track in California driving a bulky oversized Chevy Silverado, I got introduced to an enormous and downright baffling array of car options.  I could choose the angle at which my tires canted in increments of about one one hundredth of a degree.  I could vary the impact angle of my suspension, increase or decrease the down force on the car’s chassis, alter the gear ratio, and do any of a dozen other things to my car.  By the time I had finished listening to all the audio help files included with each option, I began to wonder if this was a game or an auto repair manual.  In fact, I began to wonder if I could get ASE certification credit just by playing the game!

And these aren’t just cosmetic options, either–though you do have a panoply of those.  Each alteration you make to your car will change, subtly, the way it handles.  Decreasing the gear ratio, for example, decreases the time between gears shifting, thus giving you faster acceleration by getting to the top gears faster.  But INCREASING the gear ratio gives you a higher top speed by increasing the time between gears shifting, allowing you to build momentum between each shift.  To see me write that last sentence you’d think that I’d been a shade tree mechanic all my life but I assure you that I do not even change the oil on my own car.  My dad does it.  He works extraordinarily cheap and I don’t do that much driving anyway so it’s not much imposition on him.

But despite the massive option overload in Dirt, you have to remember that this is a racing game.  You will, essentially, just be going fast and turning left.  Sometimes, for variety, you will turn right, especially on the road rally tracks.  Granted, you will be able to choose almost to the micron just how fast you go and just how quickly you turn left, but that’s all you’ll be doing at the end of the day.  You go fast. You turn left.  End of story.

If you like that sort of experience, and you can’t get enough of tweaking a car until it runs PRECISELY how you want it, then you will be utterly enamored with Dirt.  Otherwise, keep well away from this dull track runner.