izigame.me

Damn, this game is good, but...

Steam reviews ask if I would recommend this game to others, not if the game is good or not and no, I would not recommend this to anyone I know, unless they are a masochist. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to discourage people from playing this game, just warn them, so they know what they are getting themselves into. If you know rally as a sport, you know it's insanely hard and this game replicates the difficulty pretty well. This is far from being a casual racing game. This game alone is a hobby, a chore, requiring you to play it every single day for hour/two to become average at it. It will test your patience, your skill and will make you, either hate it and leave, or push through and fall in love with it. You must learn that perfect sweet spot for every corner in every stage in every location, because if you don't, you'll have a bad time. Enter the corner too fast, you'll fly out and crash. enter it too slow, you'll lose speed and momentum and precious time(and maybe crash).
I played with keyboard, controller and wheel (mostly on controller), without VR and the controls are really good and responsive. Plenty of cars to drive, something for everyone. Locations in the game are all unique in their own way, some are worse than others, but it depends a lot on your personal preference.
Now for some legit criticism.
-Big chunk of the game, including the main career mode is always online. Personally, I don't have issues with that, but someone might hate it. Server crashes happen. Not so often, but they do. You have custom events, FIA Rallycross Championship, time trials and Colin McRae DLC that are offline though.
-DLCs are insanely predatory. So in Dirt Rally(1), we had 6 locations for rally. In this game they added 6 new locations and the old ones from Dirt Rally(1) were placed as DLC. All 6 of them. They could have added some with base game and place some as DLC, then later add other new locations like they did with Scotland, for example Croatia, Estonia, Cote d'Ivoire, Cyprus, etc., but I guess that takes too much time, money and commitment for them.
-Even worse issue is with DLC cars. Huge amount of vehicles from the first game are placed as DLC in DR2 and those cars are, suspiciously, the legendary vehicles like Lancia 037, Ford Focus RS 2001, Subaru Impreza, Citroen C4 and many more. There are new vehicles in DLCs too and I have no issues with that. This predatory practices should not be a standard with video games and should not be accepted as normality.
-Dirt Rally(1) was delisted and online was shut down, so you can expect the same thing to happen to this game after a while too.
-No Pikes Peak Hill Climb from first game.
-F*ck EA.
You'll see my play hours grow after this review. It's a good game (would be even better if it wasn't owned by EA), you just have to commit. Commit hard.
R.I.P. Colin McRae
R.I.P. Richard Burns