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tl;dr

This game is absolutely gorgeous fun to drive. It looks great and there are a great range of cars and tracks. I still feel it is a bit too heavily focused towards the hardcore masochist gamers but some small changes make it more fun for more casual gamers like me. I think it is worth getting the Game of the Year Edition as there are significantly more cars and locations.

Standard Edition vs Game of the Year Edition vs original Dirty Rally

I bought the Game of the Year Edition when I saw the massive wall of DLC and concluded the base game must be a hollowed out shell of a game. Looking at the details now this is not true. The base game has more content that the original Dirt Rally but I do think the Game of the Year Edition is the better option.
Locations



Standard
GOTY
Original


Rally
6
13
6


Rallycross
8
13
3


Hillclimb
0
0
1


Free roam
1
1
0


The standard game rally locations are all new. Most of extra ones in the GOTY Edition are revamped versions of the ones from the previous game. The standard game does not include any snow or ice rally locations. 2 of the rallycross locations from the previous game remain in the standard game and the other one is included in the GOTY Edition. The hillclimb mode is completely gone which is a shame. I’m not really sure what the point of the free roam location is. Given it is based round the DirtFish rally school I’d speculate it was intended to be a tutorial level but it never got finished. The extra locations in the GOTY Edition integrate into career, time trial, custom and FIA World Rallycross Championship modes. They integrate into the daily, weekly, monthly events but these are heavily weighted to the standard game locations. These locations do not appear in the historic rally mode.
Cars



Standard
GOTY
Original


Rally
41
57
32


Rallycross
12
25
10


Hillclimb
0
0
4


Most of the cars from the previous game are are still present. A few have been replaced with slightly different versions but a few have fallen by the wayside such as the Hyundai i20 and the Mini Countryman. With one exception, all of the extra cars included in the GOTY Edition are new classes of car not in the standard game at all. These are:

Group B (RWD)
F2 Kit Car
Up to 2000cc (These are late 90s early 2000s cars)
Group B (Rallycross)
RX Supercars 2019

The extra cars in the GOTY Edition integrate into career, time trial and custom modes. They integrate into the daily, weekly, monthly events but these are heavily weighted to the standard game cars. The extra cars do not appear in the historic rally or FIA World Rallycross Championship modes.
Other
As well as the new locations and cars the GOTY Edition also includes a bunch of extra starting money. All of the extra cars and a handful of cars from the standard game are unlocked from the start. This is nice as it really cuts down the amount of tedious grinding you have to do to save up for new cars and gives a lot more variety in the early stages of the game. The GOTY Edition also comes with a series of challenges based round the career of Colin McRae. These are really nice as it adds variety, these challenges are not just about winning, they include goals like finishing without taking damage or finishing above a certain position when starting with specific damage.
Conclusion
I think the extra tracks and cars are well worth getting the GOTY Edition. The more difficult question is should you still buy the original Dirt Rally as well as this game? I’d lean towards yes, it is not as polished as this game as this but you can get many more hours of gameplay out of it. Also I can see that these games are not going to appeal everyone so if you can pick up the original game for cheap in a sale you can save yourself the money of buying this one if it turns out to not be your cup of tea.

Review

My comments here are through the lens of what I thought about the original Dirt Rally which was that the driving experience was fantastic but it pandered too much to the hard core gamers and lacked the glue to make it into a great game.
So let’s start with the good. I cannot overstate how much fun the driving is in this game. There are so many different classic cars that are noticeably different to drive. In this game the weather and tyre wear seem to have a more significant effect. The tracks are nice and varied. The game looks and sounds gorgeous. The achievements are a bit more varied than the previous game which makes it a bit more fun to collect them.
Career mode was the main focus of the previous game but in this game I barely touched it. It is still too difficult and focused on grinding to unlock the tuned up version of the cars. It is however improved from the previous game. The levelling up of your crew is a bit nicer. The daily, weekly and monthly events are now done with the same cars you use in career mode. This makes the grinding for career mode much less tedious as you can have multiple events on the go at the same time and switch between them. Because you are racing against other people in daily, weekly and monthly events it is a much more level playing field. If you do a relatively smooth run with a few mistakes you will finish in the top 20-25% of a daily challenge against other people but dead last against the AI. It is way more satisfying to finish in the top 100 on a challenge against other people that it is to hopelessly thrashed by the arbitrarily difficult AI. There are a lot more of these events than the previous game too.
I really like the addition of Historic rally and FIA World Rallycross Championship modes. For me these were where the most of the fun was to be had. You skip all the tedium of career mode and can just get behind the wheel of all your favourite cars but with a nice sense of progression as you unlock more events. I just wish this section of the game was bigger and featured more of the extra content of the GOTY Edition.
A few other minor quibbles. I didn’t like the new co-driver I found him too animated in his speech, I preferred the previous less emotional, consistent directions but I got used to it. Still no Toyotas, I realise this is probably due to some boring licencing agreements but in my head it is because someone in the team is still holding a grudge from the 1995 WRC. Being able to set the name that appears on the car is a nice touch but why not make this work with the realistic liveries as well? In a similar vein it would be nice if the cars had decals specific to the different rally locations. I still think it would be nice to have more of the assists from Dirt 3 like the time rewind to make this accessible to more casual gamers. It would also be nice to have a bit of AI in the spectators. It does break the immersion when you crash and the spectators just stand there indifferent to their inevitable demise. I realise getting them to all jump out the way like in Driver San Francisco is a bit of an ask but they could at least react to the car.
Conclusion
So there are a few things I would have done differently if I was in charge of this game but overall this has to be one of my favourite racing games.