DiRT Rally 2.0

I have spent more Saturday nights than I care to admit sitting at a wheel rig, palms sweaty, listening to a co-driver rattle off pace notes through a New Zealand forest at night, and DiRT Rally 2.0 is the reason my Logitech pedals have scuff marks on them. This is a hardcore rally simulation, full stop. Codemasters deliberately stepped away from the procedurally generated, more forgiving approach of DiRT 4 and went back to handcrafted, unforgiving stages across six real-world locations: New Zealand, Argentina, Spain, Poland, Australia, and the USA. There is no rewind function here. You get a limited number of stage restarts across an entire rally, so every flat-left-into-hairpin call from your co-driver carries genuine weight. The physics are the headline act. Codemasters focused hard on how a spinning tyre interacts with different gravel types, and the result is rear-wheel-drive cars that feel alive and genuinely dangerous in a way that previous entries never quite nailed. Track degradation is the other big talking point: your start position in the running order directly affects how chewed-up the surface is when you get to it, which means a late draw in a competitive stage can turn a manageable corner into a rutted nightmare. The weather system compounds this further, with rain changing grip levels mid-event and forcing you to adapt on the fly rather than drive to a memorised script. On top of that, the My Team career mode has you hiring engineers, upgrading staff roles, and managing repair windows between stages, where an upgraded crew chief can literally shave seconds off your penalty for rolling the car. It sounds like busywork but the tangible cause-and-effect of those decisions keeps the career loop genuinely engaging across dozens of hours. The car roster sits at over 50 vehicles, from the terrifying Group B machines like the Audi Quattro S1 E2 through to modern WRX Supercars and classic historics including the iconic 1995 Subaru Impreza. Alongside the point-to-point rally discipline, there are eight FIA World Rallycross Championship circuits where you race bumper-to-bumper against opponents. The Rallycross AI is the one persistent gripe worth flagging: it is aggressively physical in a way that feels unfair, particularly at tight first corners where a shunt from behind can end your heat through no fault of your own. Online Rallycross is a much cleaner experience and the competitive leaderboard ecosystem through RaceNet keeps solo play feeling connected to a broader community. One heads-up for solo players: the career mode requires a persistent internet connection, which has caused issues for some. Hardware context matters here more than in almost any other genre. The game supports 60 officially listed peripherals across Thrustmaster, Logitech, and Fanatec, and unofficially recognises older wheels going back surprisingly far. A good force-feedback wheel and pedals transform the experience from very good to something genuinely special. VR support was added post-launch for Rift, Index, and HTC Vive, and when it runs well it is one of the most visceral first-person racing experiences on PC. Some animation frame rate quirks in VR slightly break immersion, and the cockpit positioning in certain cars needs manual HMD height calibration to feel right, but none of that is a dealbreaker. A gamepad works fine for getting started, but do not expect the same depth of feel. There is no split-screen mode here, so the four-friends-on-the-couch crowd should look elsewhere. This is a headphones-on, wheel-locked-to-desk, do-not-disturb game. Metacritic sits at 84 and the community reception has reflected that: praised consistently for its physics fidelity, criticised occasionally for an underwhelming career structure and the aggressive Rallycross AI. If you are a rally enthusiast or someone who wants to become one, it rewards the investment of time and hardware like very few racing titles do.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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