Dirt 3: Complete Edition Review (Robi_Wan)
If you enjoy any kind of rally or rallycross at all, I highly recommend this game. Nice mix between a sim and arcade. One of those "easy to learn, difficult to master" games. Anyone can jump in and pick up the basics quickly, but there's always room for improvement, room to push yourself just a little bit more to lower your time just that much more. 600+ hours and counting...
Pro's:
- GFWL finally removed! This was huge for this game. It took longer than expected, but credit Codies for sticking with it and finally getting this amazing game transfered over to steamworks. Not only that, but all DLC packs included for owners of the game. Pretty cool if you ask me.
- Driving engine/physics. The cars handle great and each has it's unique way it reacts to your input. Most classes have various cars that are competitive, so you always see a decent mix of vehicles in online sessions. Also, aside from class B (curse you Lancia Delta!), the DLC cars don't hold any advantage over the base cars.
- Decent tracks. I understand the rally stages aren't what die hard Dirt fans enjoyed in the older games, but they're not bad. While I do enjoy rally, I'm personally into the RX side a little more. Of course I'd like a bigger variety, but I feel like most of the RX tracks pretty well set up, making them competitive and giving good places to set up passes.
- Pretty good community. This is an "old" game, but even still it has a decent online community for it's age.
Cons:
-AI is pretty terrible, both for the drivers and the game setups. Even the highest degree of difficulty of RX in single player provides no competitiion at all once you've learned the tracks. Rally is a little bit better, but the problem is all the drivers use the same racing lines for the most part. You don't really see them make mistakes much, they just drive slower on lower difficulties and faster on harder. Too predictable. As for the game setups, on certain game types where AI input is needed, it fails miserably. Example. Cat n' Mouse is a team based game. If you're playing 4 v 4 and one person on one team leaves, and someone else joins, the new person has an equal chance to be placed on either team, so you constantly end up with 5 v 3 or 6 v 2 scenarios by the end of a session. Seems like this would have been something very easy to fix, but never got done. As long as nobody leaves though, you can just set up even teams in the beggining and you'll be fine.
Overall though, I definetely recommend this to any rally/RX fan or racing fan in general.