Dirt Rally 2.0 Review (LeonserGT)
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"Your DiRT Rally 2.0 review has been reset to negatve, because a discrepancy between offline gameplay and your shit servers was detected."
For those who don't know: there are tons of cases from 2019 from people losing their career progress due to this s h i t. After 9 hours and about to finish my FIRST championship victoriously, got my progress wiped on the LAST race. Moreover, it kept all the expenses without refunding any of them. Still no fix.
Codemasters? More like coderеtаrds.
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OK OK, 100 hrs later and I feel like it showed enough good to scarcely tip the balance into the "recommended" territory, hard-won, since that reset experience is way too infuriating and nothing like that have rights to exist.
It might feel punishing at the start and its because of another retarded move by devs (I kinda planned to switch my negative review to positive, didn't I? huh): setting a 20% steering deadzone for ANY controller by default, including wheels. Make sure to go to settings and turn it off and now the game plays like it should.
After overcoming this concealed obstacle, it suddenly is so satisfying to drive here, over and over, I keep getting back to it, WE keep getting back to it - a bunch of colleagues, who bought it together at a huge discount, we consistently return here time and time again, to race in RX laps or compete asynchronously via time trial, trying to beat each other's times.
Physics and drive assists strikes such a perfect balance to be fun and approachable AND realistic enough at the same time, even tho asphalt friction raises some questions and I know you made a rear axle turn a tiny bit by an assist, can't hide that lol
There's plenty of really stupid design decisions hidden in the career section, however, on top of my initial reason for a negative review - I can also add the fact that past "clubman" difficulty you won't see rain or night stages again, since they couldn't bother to code virtual opponents to be handicapped by these conditions just as much as you are, so they just removed them. You have to actively de-rank yourself back into the noob difficulties of the career and BOOM - rains and nights are back on the menu, boys!
However, dailies and weeklies provided enough motivation to try out different classes and tracks, I even started using RWD (blasphemy!) at times... and when you start getting bored by the classic rally, you suddenly realize rally cross exists and once you actually get in the mood for RX specifically - it's like a huge side-grade to the main experience - good decision to split rally and RX careers, btw.
And if you got tired of RX? There's a whole Colin McRae DLC with tough challenges to beat, although the early parts sucks since the game doesnt trust you with car tuning yet.
Anyways, I'll keep racing RX or time trial with my buddies during lunch breaks, I wish more sims were as gamepad-friendly as this one (looking at you, AC series!)