Colin McRae: Dirt Review — The Pyramid, the Points and the Repair Clock

Colin McRae: Dirt arrived on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in September 2007, built by Codemasters Southam and published by Codemasters. It runs on a new engine called Neon, co-developed with Sony Computer Entertainment, and it carries 46 cars and 186 liveries. It is also the last game in the series published before Colin McRae died in a helicopter accident.

Trailer, via howdown.

The Pyramid, the Points and the Repair Clock

Career mode is a stylized pyramid of 11 tiers. The bottom tier holds 11 events, and each event is one or more races of a single type that demands a specific car. Place well and you earn up to 10 points per race. Most events need a set number of points inside a tier before they unlock, so the pyramid opens upward as you score, all the way to the Champion of Champions event at the top.

Money buys cars and liveries, and the payout tracks the difficulty you pick when you enter an event. Harder settings mean tougher AI opponents and more realistic damage. Repeat a finished event and you earn significantly less than the first time, unless you raise the difficulty.

Multi-race rally events let you repair between stages. You get 60 minutes of repair time at each point, spent against time estimates for each component. That clock is the best idea in the game.

Three Modes, One Clock

Multiplayer puts up to 100 players into rally races run as solo competition. No other cars, ghosts or players share the track. Fastest time wins.

The PlayStation 3 version landed in Europe one day before McRae died. His name was later stripped from future titles and from re-releases after DiRT 3.

What Holds Up and What Doesn’t

The 100-player mode sounds like the headline feature. It isn’t. With no cars on track, it is a time trial with a large leaderboard, and the tension of wheel-to-wheel racing never shows up. The Career pyramid is the real game, and it works because the structure keeps forcing you into cars and disciplines you would not choose on your own.

The repair clock is where Dirt separates itself from the rally games around it. Sixty minutes against component estimates turns a menu into a decision. Spend the time on the gearbox or the suspension, and the next stage tells you whether you were right.

The damage model earns its place too, and it scales with difficulty rather than sitting at one fixed setting. That is a smart way to let a player choose how much punishment the game hands out.

Dirt is not the cleanest handling model Codemasters ever shipped, and the 100-player pitch oversells what is essentially solo hot-lapping. But the pyramid, the payout system and the repair clock give it a spine most racing games of its year lacked. Its place in the series is heavier than its mechanics: this is the last one with McRae’s name on it as a living endorsement, and the studio’s decision to remove that name afterward makes Dirt the end of something.

Codemasters · Colin McRae Dirt · PlayStation 3 · racing games · rally games · retro game review