DiRT impressions

So, I've been playing DiRT for about a week now. The presentation of this game is absolutely top notch! Fantastic menu system and interface. The racing is also a lot of fun. A nice balance between sim and arcade. Maybe leaning a tad more towards arcade. It is insanely fun to be barreling down a narrow dirt road at insane speeds while listening to your co-pilot's instructions of the upcoming turns. Those calls are life savers!

The game looks fantastic too. Good one to pop in to show off your HD set to your friends.

What has impressed me the most though is the physics and interactivity with the environment. Most of my experience with racing games has come from the Gran Turismo series. And one thing those games have nothing of, is interaction with the terrain. Your cars are indestructible and a small fence acts like a 10 foot think concrete barrier. The first time I took a turn a little too fast in DiRT and the rear of my car power slid too far off the track and I hit those little orange plastic fences
they put up and actually saw the fences give way and get torn up as I sped away, it was like a whole new word. Gran Turismo 4 had those little fences too in their rally courses. Hitting them caused your car to come to a complete stop. Nice.

Get too close to any of the various plant life on the road side and it too gives way and reacts to your car. Pretty awesome when you are careering down the road at 100+ mph, take a small jump and land a bit too close to the side of the road and you just scrape a few branches. Talk about tense.

So far I am battling through Career-mode, which is a giant pyramid of different events. This will take a while.

Graphically, as a total package, the game wows. Great lighting, great textures, great courses, and great car models. All the cars come with a fully rendered interiors, so fans of cockpit views are in for a treat. I found the game very playable from this view as well, something I couldn't say for PGR3. If you begin to dissect individual aspects of the visuals, you notice that other games do certain things better. The
car models are better in other games, the textures are better in other games, etc. But bring them all together, and this is one of the most impressive racers I have seen.