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Dirt 4 review

Owen S. Good is a longtime veteran of video games writing, well known for his coverage of sports and racing games.

Dirt 4 has just one expectation of its players: Enjoy racing. It will take care of the rest.

Experienced, novice, casual, committed, car buff, adrenaline junkie or anything in between, Dirt 4 has a sweet spot for everyone and it takes no time to find it. The game's most profound strength is the unlimited variety and replayability offered by a simple course creation tool, which is well suited to rally racing's basic appeal: hurtling into something new and unknown with nerve, skill and flat-out speed.

Of course, it's essential to a racing game that the driving action be distinct and understandable across multiple vehicles classes and numerous surfaces, from taut blacktop to waterslide mud and dry, pillow-soft, well, dirt. Codemasters has been so trustworthy in this duty that the handling and traction of Dirt 4 can almost be taken for granted.

The game offers two handling settings to accommodate racers: Gamer, a more forgiving setup, and simulation, which is more challenging. There are still perceptible differences in the vehicle handling and surface traction on the easier Gamer setting. Simulation showcases these differences more, but even in the casual setting I felt like I could bias the braking, front or back, in my pre-race adjustments and give myself — and meaningfully use — a little less steer on pavement or a little more on gravel.

Dirt 4's fundamental appeal is in the reckless handling of rally racing, after all. The dirty secret of all racing video games is that folks coast into the turns, drift, and occasionally brake by hitting a wall or an opponent. Dirt 4 was a license to sling gravel through every turn of a rally course, counter-steering to my heart's content. Hatchback door banging, shredded tire throwing sparks, exhaust farting in the turns like a wild pony, I still snipped the finish line in a respectable third place in Australia.

Racing a clean lap is always an admirable goal, but Dirt 4 knows the majesty of its sport is flat-out hooning through gritted teeth. Getting into these adverse situations won’t fail the race, but you still have to extricate yourself from them. In Wales, I was allowed to skid off the outside shoulder of an open hairpin and, with my entire rear axle scrambling for traction like Scooby-Doo running away from a ghost, still make a clean getaway to first place.

I found a big difficulty spike, though, between the fourth AI difficulty, "demanding" and "tough," its hardest setting. Unless the course is raced perfectly, beating a "tough" AI field requires using a manual transmission at minimum, and maybe other advanced options, to get off the line at top speed and recover from otherwise costly mistakes down the course. There is still plenty of racing enjoyment in Dirt 4's less complex settings, but experienced racers will probably blow away a bot field rated anything less than tough, while newcomers stand little chance against the top setting.

The timed, straight-ahead rally is Dirt 4's bread and butter, and it has two series, one for modern cars and another for heritage vehicles of the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Then there's the Land Rush, which is a circuit course for buggies (most fun) trucks (fun, but always a crapshoot, which is still fun in its own way) and the inscrutable crosskarts (no fun). There is an officially branded World Rallycross championship, which is racing against a live field on real-world courses of variable surfaces. This is the hairiest series, especially in multiplayer, and requires a user to make precise entries into each turn of the first lap to have any shot at clearing the pack.

Dirt 4 encourages the user to try all of it with a persistent career layer that applies sponsorship goals and team branding to the car in every event. Players will be asked to upgrade their support staff, their PR, their sponsorships, and facilities that enhance all three. The game didn't set any rigid path for developing my racing team. I pursued the quick-money multipliers first, to earn cash for the vehicles I wanted, before settling on top-flight personnel and the amenities that would keep them happy. I felt that I could have done the opposite and still found success.

The best thing I can say for Dirt 4 is that I never felt punished and I never felt babied. Seasoned racers know how hard it is for a game to thread that needle, without rubber-banding or cheap tricks at the edges. In every course, in every championship event, in every car was something for me and my tastes. Everyone wants to win and feel like they earned it, and the variable difficulties, handling settings and driver AI delivered this again and again. Some of my best races were in the trucks series in Nevada, fending off that field of horny prom dates every single lap, feeling like I should win the whole time but mindful it could be lost in a careless instant.

If Dirt 4 fails at anything, it was only in selling me on the importance and value of that creation tool in the first place. Yeah, yeah, “肠谤别补迟颈辞苍” mode, OK, I'm busy with the career now. I'll get to that later.

No. You need to see this.

It's in the events menu, under freeplay, in the rally or historic rally disciplines. (Two other racing series are available with customizable options but they race fixed courses.) Just two sliders, for length and complexity, are used to generate the course from five environments. That's it. I could build a three-stage event in two minutes. It then became a full partner event in my career, with all the sponsorship bonuses and the like.

If I had a great run, if I really nailed that long hairpin turn midway through and slammed the door on the competition, or if I did OK but felt like I left a lot of seconds out there, there was always the option to save the stage and run it later. Thanks to Dirt 4's strong visual variety and, in particular, its lighting (which poses legitimate hazards depending on when and where you run), the generated courses looked as if they had been stamped on the disc by the creators themselves. Nothing seemed generic and easy, or bizarre and unrealistically complicated.

Go ahead and finish up the standard career on the standard courses offered. It's a great introduction to the game's different racing modes, to Michigan's muddy woods, or a rural highway in sun-baked Spain, or the snowy logging roads of Sweden. These stages are the basis for the online leaderboards after all.

This is not the real game though. The ease and variety of that stage creator is, and it will keep me coming back to Dirt 4 for months. It's a big-picture toolkit, one that doesn't allow me to manipulate corners or elevation or other granular details. But I wouldn't visit an open-ended creation mode that did, nor do I really care to tweak the layout off a generated stage The point, I felt, is to be given something unfamiliar and step up to its challenge.

Wrap-up

I've never been more charmed by a racing video game and I could not recommend any other more than Dirt 4, to anyone of any ability. Dirt 4 is a joy. When Jen Horsey, one of two English-language co-drivers, cheerfully calls out "and left five over crest," it's a bugle call. I'm on the gas with supreme confidence, rocketing into a gold medallion sunset, holding tight to the moment in one of the great summertime video games of the past decade.

Dirt 4 was reviewed using a pre-release “retail” PS4 download code provided by Codemasters. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

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