Dirt 3

DiRT 3 is Codemasters' third entry in the DiRT off-road series and the first one to fully drop the Colin McRae name. What you get is a generous mix of disciplines: traditional point-to-point rally stages with a co-driver reading pace notes, Rallycross on closed mixed-surface circuits, Trailblazer flat-out sprint events, Landrush buggy racing, and the headline act, Gymkhana. That last one tasks you with racking up points by chaining donuts, drifts through gates, jumps, and controlled spins around closed freestyle arenas. Venues span three continents, from Finnish forests and Kenyan national parks to snowy Michigan and the Los Angeles Coliseum, and the new dynamic weather system adds rain, snow, and night racing to keep the atmosphere varied and the grip levels unpredictable. The career mode, called Dirt Tour, has you earning reputation points to unlock sponsors and new vehicles across about 50 cars covering everything from 1960s Mini Cooper S classics to modern Ford Fiesta and Subaru Impreza WRX STI spec machines. The scalability is genuinely good: slap on all the driver assists, use the five Flashback rewinds per race, and a newcomer can stay competitive. Strip the aids out, crank it to pro, and switch to realistic damage (which actually hurts your car's performance mid-race), and it bites back hard. If you own a wheel and pedal set, this is a much better time than playing on a pad, the handling rewards proper footwork without punishing you for not having a £400 direct drive setup. Multiplayer is where DiRT 3 gets genuinely weird in the best way. Online party modes include Outbreak (zombie infection, one car goes green and has to tag everyone else), Invasion (smash alien cut-outs for points, ram a building and lose one), and a capture-the-flag variant with teams of up to four battling over a flag across the map. Gymkhana events are available online too, so you can absolutely host a scorecard competition with friends and watch everyone discover how hard a clean donut combo actually is. Split-screen is also supported across all game modes, which makes it a rare and useful thing for couch co-op nights. The multiplayer is split into a ranked pro section and a more casual party section, so nobody has to sweat the leaderboard unless they want to. There are real caveats. If you are coming from DiRT 2, the upgrade is evolutionary rather than transformative. The career mode can feel repetitive in event structure, and the Gymkhana missions are woven into the main campaign whether you like them or not, something that divides the community hard. Rally purists in particular grumble that the stages feel short and that Gymkhana does not belong in a rally game at all. The original release also had a notorious Games For Windows Live dependency that made saving and launching a mess, but the Complete Edition version stripped that out and bundled all the DLC, making it the version worth having. The single player campaign can be finished in under ten hours if you push through, so long-term value depends almost entirely on how much you chase leaderboard times and online chaos. For a casual group looking for a racing game that works equally well for a lone sim-curious player and a four-person couch session, DiRT 3 still holds up. It is not the deepest off-road sim and it is definitely showing its age, but the handling feels great across a gamepad, the multiplayer modes are the kind of daft fun that keeps people up until 2am, and the Gymkhana mode, love it or hate it, is unlike anything in most racing libraries.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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