Is this even the same series? The first three games all had very different aesthetics, sure, but not only does this game not look even remotely similar to the other three from any angle, it doesn't play anything like them either. I think Codemasters completely forgot what this series was supposed to be. It makes no sense for DIRT 3 to have led to this - yes I know DIRT Rally came between 3 and 4, ignore that for me please - and even less sense for this to have led to the abominable DIRT 5.
Immediately this game confirms the suspicion I had about DIRT 3 having driver assistance despite turning all the assists off, because DIRT 4 gives you the choice between "gamer" and "simulation" handling styles, where "simulation" feels like there really are no more assists holding you back or softening your inputs, but the car is also unpredictable and inconsistent, and "gamer" feels like something in between DIRT 3 and 5 with a ridiculous amount of grip making most surfaces feel the same, while also taking some control away from you in an effort to keep the car going. This is great in theory and I love having options like that... I just wish the choices were good. I don't feel comfortable with either option in this game, because the challenge of simulation mode comes more from the unpredictability than actually being challenging, and gamer mode takes away some control and has so much grip that it may as well have become a circuit racer. Simulation mode also brings a nasty effect that feels like the car is forcibly pulling away from the direction of your inputs in high speed turns, especially when sliding, which also leads to a shockingly fast and hard response to inputs that should be minor corrections but end up becoming major over-corrections, and that's all ten times worse in FWD cars, which have some of the worst handling characteristics I've ever experienced in a racing game.
I've seen a lot of argument around the internet about which game has the better physics, this or DIRT Rally, and I will confidently and loudly say that it is definitely not this game. I'm not looking for a hardcore simulator or perfect realism here, that's not what these games are made for, but I do at least want physics that are consistent and predictable (like simulation mode isn't) without undermining a part of the game's main appeal (like gamer mode does). No matter which option I chose, I wasn't happy, but I ultimately settled on gamer mode because I'd rather sacrifice some control and deal with excessive grip than be in a constant high-stakes full-focus battle against the physics engine. It doesn't matter anyway because the difficulty is too low to care. At one point, I won a stage in simulation mode on the highest difficulty with a flip, a four second penalty for recovering, a head on crash into a spin, and a right rear tire that came off two thirds of the way through, leaving the car borderline uncontrollable and much slower as a result.
I came to those conclusions about the physics before even starting the game properly, because after a trial run on a short stage, you get thrown into the excellent DirtFish rally school and are given the option to take some lessons on the basics of car control, plus some more advanced techniques. I love that this is present, because it's one thing to make a game accessible to wider audiences by giving them assists or lowered difficulty options, but giving them a comprehensive set of lessons on how to improve their own skills quickly is another, and I desperately wish we saw that more often in games of all genres. Lessons like this that explain a concept, tell you how it works and how to do it, then let you practice before moving on, will always be vastly preferable and superior to text based tutorials, popups, tooltips, or god-forsaken contextual button prompts, especially if they're either optional or skippable. However, I do also believe that the lessons in this game leave a lot to be desired and they could have been far, far better.
For instance, the lesson on weight transfer essentially tells you how to do it and throws you into practice, but it doesn't teach you much of anything about how weight transfer works or why it's something important to think about. In other lessons, certain terminology is used that was never taught in any earlier lessons, like "slip angle" and "off-line", and given that the lessons are clearly intended to be a ground-up crash course, explaining terms like that - even if it's just a short blurb of text - would have gone a long way, since these terms could then be used more extensively, rather than as random asides like they are. Halfway through, there's the disciplines section, which just gives you a text dump on what the different race types are and how they work, which I think would have been better off dropped from the lessons entirely since you get a narration explaining the disciplines before your first race in each. After finishing all of the lessons, it felt like what was once a solid crash course had some segments cut out of it, especially since some of the lessons that would have been great to practice with were only video clips with narration, like manual starts and cambered corners, and something as basic and vital to offroad racing as how to control oversteer and understeer - more terms that could have used a short explanation - were only ever implied rather than explained or taught.
On top of all that, a somewhat glaring issue with all of this is that none of these lessons ever go over the actual controls of the game! Sure, a lot of PC players are probably used to checking or even remapping the controls in the options before playing a game, but those players also probably don't need any of these lessons either! If you're going to attempt to teach players how to be better at your game, put the effort in and go all the way so even the freshest of beginners can pick it up and learn it properly without leaving so many holes for unanswered questions when they're done. The game even starts out with a trial run on a short stage, like I already mentioned, and that run teaches the player about pace notes, then takes their performance on the stage and suggests a difficulty level based on that... so if you're worried about experienced players being bored by the basics, why not use that same trial run to determine at what point the lessons begin? Make them optional so people can skip what want to and go back if they want to see earlier lessons that the trial run determined they didn't need. I love the inclusions of the lessons, and what's present is definitely good, but I wish they were better.
But speaking of better, having your own team! I like that little addition. It doesn't really change the game, but it adds that extra little something that admittedly none of the other games had. Personalization. You could buy cars in 1 and 2, but that only got you access to an unchanging car that wasn't really your own, and in 3, car buying wasn't present at all, you chose the car you drove per race based on the team offers available to you from your level, but here in 4, the cars are your cars in your garage with parts you can change, a livery you can customize a bit, sponsors you choose yourself, and repair bills for all the damage you take. You even hire staff for your team yourself and set their wages. It's not a deep system and it's certainly not a reason to buy the game, but I like it and I'm glad it's here. Another improvement is that the rally stages are properly narrow again, which helps some with the sense of speed and adds a lot of thrill back into the mix that DIRT 3 was lacking.
Too bad that's all the good I can think of. I did not have very much fun with this game, and that's a shame because it theoretically has the most satisfying and in-depth form of progression in any DIRT game, but in practice, I'm just bored. My mind is numbed by it. The most obvious reasons for that are that the difficulty is too low for me and neither of the two available handling models suit me, but it's so much more than that.
Tracks are all procedurally generated now and have nothing visually or mechanically interesting about them, so devastatingly lacking in the uniqueness department that not only does every track feel the same, I mentally decoded exactly how the track generation works after a few hours and became forever unable to unsee the fact that not only is every stage made of blocks, and not only are those blocks reused in every stage, single stages reuse entirely identical blocks more than once. Like my favorite, Fitzroy, right 5 into left 6 long tightens over crest, right 5. That's burned into my head now. I hate Fitzroy.
The music in the soundtrack is fine but you almost never hear it, and when you do, it's usually through a horrendous filter that's supposed to make it sound like it's coming from a distant PA system. The entire interface of the game is flat and uninteresting, no emphasis whatsoever is placed on any other drivers, and the only aspect of the presentation with any kind of personality is your co-driver, who only has so much to say anyway. Credit where it's due, the co-driver in this game is great and has a lot more personality than previous games while also giving more information more accurately, and the option to customize how far ahead the pace notes are read out to you is great, but a co-driver does not support an entire game.
Rallycross, meanwhile, is just so extremely boring compared to previous games, but now with the addition of a spotter that repeats the same line on every single lap about what position he thinks you'll be in after all other drivers take their joker laps, just to make it extra miserable. On one hand, rallycross cars handle more predictably than rally cars so that makes them an improvement, but on the other hand, they're too predictable and feel dead and soulless, which when combined with the fact you're doing a lot of laps around tiny tracks, makes even the closest racing feel like a sleepy haze. Making that feeling even worse still is the fact that the head camera (which is the only camera angle I used in this game, third person was unsuable) has absolutely zero movement, so the game feels frozen stiff in rallycross where the terrain is mostly smooth. I didn't even bother to try landrush.
Flashbacks are also gone entirely, which is a huge shame, because the Codemasters implementation of rewinding in racing games is by far the best in the business, and I'd much rather spend a consumable rewind instead of restarting the entire stage if I crash out at the very end, which is more likely in this game than any of the previous. Also many cars have the exact same power and weight, and I mean exactly the same numbers, yet they're somehow vastly different to drive. In particular, I found the Group A Impreza to be vastly superior in both speed and handling to the Evo VI, and the 2000cc Impreza vastly superior in both speed and handling to the Group A one, even though all three cars have exactly 300 bhp and weigh exactly 2711 lbs. Weird game, I don't like it, and I don't want to play it anymore.
Gamer mode says "I'm here to have fun" on it, and it's true, that's what I'm here for, but that's not what I'm getting from DIRT 4. DIRT 2 is still the best of the five in my opinion, because that's where all the fun is, and DIRT Rally is clearly the better choice for a simulator experience thanks to its full focus on detailed and satisfying realistic physics that actually make sense. This game, then, has no reason to exist. Was it meant to be a casualized version of DIRT Rally in response to the success of that game? Is there even an audience for that? Did they get negative feedback on this game and catastrophically overcorrect with DIRT 5, or was that game actually planned to be that way from the start? I don't understand this game at all and after playing it, I no longer understand the franchise as a whole, because not a single game so far has had any meaningful similarity to any of the others. The worst part of it all is that this game, like DIRT 3, is far from a bad game, it has all the elements it needs to be excellent... but unlike DIRT 3, it just isn't excellent at all, and I don't know how they managed to so spectacularly fail to put any of the pieces together when it was all right in front of them.
I'm just going to play DIRT 2 again and forget this game exists. Shouldn't be too hard, since the only memorable aspect of this game is that you can have Nicky Grist as your co-driver.
(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#dirt-4)
Immediately this game confirms the suspicion I had about DIRT 3 having driver assistance despite turning all the assists off, because DIRT 4 gives you the choice between "gamer" and "simulation" handling styles, where "simulation" feels like there really are no more assists holding you back or softening your inputs, but the car is also unpredictable and inconsistent, and "gamer" feels like something in between DIRT 3 and 5 with a ridiculous amount of grip making most surfaces feel the same, while also taking some control away from you in an effort to keep the car going. This is great in theory and I love having options like that... I just wish the choices were good. I don't feel comfortable with either option in this game, because the challenge of simulation mode comes more from the unpredictability than actually being challenging, and gamer mode takes away some control and has so much grip that it may as well have become a circuit racer. Simulation mode also brings a nasty effect that feels like the car is forcibly pulling away from the direction of your inputs in high speed turns, especially when sliding, which also leads to a shockingly fast and hard response to inputs that should be minor corrections but end up becoming major over-corrections, and that's all ten times worse in FWD cars, which have some of the worst handling characteristics I've ever experienced in a racing game.
I've seen a lot of argument around the internet about which game has the better physics, this or DIRT Rally, and I will confidently and loudly say that it is definitely not this game. I'm not looking for a hardcore simulator or perfect realism here, that's not what these games are made for, but I do at least want physics that are consistent and predictable (like simulation mode isn't) without undermining a part of the game's main appeal (like gamer mode does). No matter which option I chose, I wasn't happy, but I ultimately settled on gamer mode because I'd rather sacrifice some control and deal with excessive grip than be in a constant high-stakes full-focus battle against the physics engine. It doesn't matter anyway because the difficulty is too low to care. At one point, I won a stage in simulation mode on the highest difficulty with a flip, a four second penalty for recovering, a head on crash into a spin, and a right rear tire that came off two thirds of the way through, leaving the car borderline uncontrollable and much slower as a result.
I came to those conclusions about the physics before even starting the game properly, because after a trial run on a short stage, you get thrown into the excellent DirtFish rally school and are given the option to take some lessons on the basics of car control, plus some more advanced techniques. I love that this is present, because it's one thing to make a game accessible to wider audiences by giving them assists or lowered difficulty options, but giving them a comprehensive set of lessons on how to improve their own skills quickly is another, and I desperately wish we saw that more often in games of all genres. Lessons like this that explain a concept, tell you how it works and how to do it, then let you practice before moving on, will always be vastly preferable and superior to text based tutorials, popups, tooltips, or god-forsaken contextual button prompts, especially if they're either optional or skippable. However, I do also believe that the lessons in this game leave a lot to be desired and they could have been far, far better.
For instance, the lesson on weight transfer essentially tells you how to do it and throws you into practice, but it doesn't teach you much of anything about how weight transfer works or why it's something important to think about. In other lessons, certain terminology is used that was never taught in any earlier lessons, like "slip angle" and "off-line", and given that the lessons are clearly intended to be a ground-up crash course, explaining terms like that - even if it's just a short blurb of text - would have gone a long way, since these terms could then be used more extensively, rather than as random asides like they are. Halfway through, there's the disciplines section, which just gives you a text dump on what the different race types are and how they work, which I think would have been better off dropped from the lessons entirely since you get a narration explaining the disciplines before your first race in each. After finishing all of the lessons, it felt like what was once a solid crash course had some segments cut out of it, especially since some of the lessons that would have been great to practice with were only video clips with narration, like manual starts and cambered corners, and something as basic and vital to offroad racing as how to control oversteer and understeer - more terms that could have used a short explanation - were only ever implied rather than explained or taught.
On top of all that, a somewhat glaring issue with all of this is that none of these lessons ever go over the actual controls of the game! Sure, a lot of PC players are probably used to checking or even remapping the controls in the options before playing a game, but those players also probably don't need any of these lessons either! If you're going to attempt to teach players how to be better at your game, put the effort in and go all the way so even the freshest of beginners can pick it up and learn it properly without leaving so many holes for unanswered questions when they're done. The game even starts out with a trial run on a short stage, like I already mentioned, and that run teaches the player about pace notes, then takes their performance on the stage and suggests a difficulty level based on that... so if you're worried about experienced players being bored by the basics, why not use that same trial run to determine at what point the lessons begin? Make them optional so people can skip what want to and go back if they want to see earlier lessons that the trial run determined they didn't need. I love the inclusions of the lessons, and what's present is definitely good, but I wish they were better.
But speaking of better, having your own team! I like that little addition. It doesn't really change the game, but it adds that extra little something that admittedly none of the other games had. Personalization. You could buy cars in 1 and 2, but that only got you access to an unchanging car that wasn't really your own, and in 3, car buying wasn't present at all, you chose the car you drove per race based on the team offers available to you from your level, but here in 4, the cars are your cars in your garage with parts you can change, a livery you can customize a bit, sponsors you choose yourself, and repair bills for all the damage you take. You even hire staff for your team yourself and set their wages. It's not a deep system and it's certainly not a reason to buy the game, but I like it and I'm glad it's here. Another improvement is that the rally stages are properly narrow again, which helps some with the sense of speed and adds a lot of thrill back into the mix that DIRT 3 was lacking.
Too bad that's all the good I can think of. I did not have very much fun with this game, and that's a shame because it theoretically has the most satisfying and in-depth form of progression in any DIRT game, but in practice, I'm just bored. My mind is numbed by it. The most obvious reasons for that are that the difficulty is too low for me and neither of the two available handling models suit me, but it's so much more than that.
Tracks are all procedurally generated now and have nothing visually or mechanically interesting about them, so devastatingly lacking in the uniqueness department that not only does every track feel the same, I mentally decoded exactly how the track generation works after a few hours and became forever unable to unsee the fact that not only is every stage made of blocks, and not only are those blocks reused in every stage, single stages reuse entirely identical blocks more than once. Like my favorite, Fitzroy, right 5 into left 6 long tightens over crest, right 5. That's burned into my head now. I hate Fitzroy.
The music in the soundtrack is fine but you almost never hear it, and when you do, it's usually through a horrendous filter that's supposed to make it sound like it's coming from a distant PA system. The entire interface of the game is flat and uninteresting, no emphasis whatsoever is placed on any other drivers, and the only aspect of the presentation with any kind of personality is your co-driver, who only has so much to say anyway. Credit where it's due, the co-driver in this game is great and has a lot more personality than previous games while also giving more information more accurately, and the option to customize how far ahead the pace notes are read out to you is great, but a co-driver does not support an entire game.
Rallycross, meanwhile, is just so extremely boring compared to previous games, but now with the addition of a spotter that repeats the same line on every single lap about what position he thinks you'll be in after all other drivers take their joker laps, just to make it extra miserable. On one hand, rallycross cars handle more predictably than rally cars so that makes them an improvement, but on the other hand, they're too predictable and feel dead and soulless, which when combined with the fact you're doing a lot of laps around tiny tracks, makes even the closest racing feel like a sleepy haze. Making that feeling even worse still is the fact that the head camera (which is the only camera angle I used in this game, third person was unsuable) has absolutely zero movement, so the game feels frozen stiff in rallycross where the terrain is mostly smooth. I didn't even bother to try landrush.
Flashbacks are also gone entirely, which is a huge shame, because the Codemasters implementation of rewinding in racing games is by far the best in the business, and I'd much rather spend a consumable rewind instead of restarting the entire stage if I crash out at the very end, which is more likely in this game than any of the previous. Also many cars have the exact same power and weight, and I mean exactly the same numbers, yet they're somehow vastly different to drive. In particular, I found the Group A Impreza to be vastly superior in both speed and handling to the Evo VI, and the 2000cc Impreza vastly superior in both speed and handling to the Group A one, even though all three cars have exactly 300 bhp and weigh exactly 2711 lbs. Weird game, I don't like it, and I don't want to play it anymore.
Gamer mode says "I'm here to have fun" on it, and it's true, that's what I'm here for, but that's not what I'm getting from DIRT 4. DIRT 2 is still the best of the five in my opinion, because that's where all the fun is, and DIRT Rally is clearly the better choice for a simulator experience thanks to its full focus on detailed and satisfying realistic physics that actually make sense. This game, then, has no reason to exist. Was it meant to be a casualized version of DIRT Rally in response to the success of that game? Is there even an audience for that? Did they get negative feedback on this game and catastrophically overcorrect with DIRT 5, or was that game actually planned to be that way from the start? I don't understand this game at all and after playing it, I no longer understand the franchise as a whole, because not a single game so far has had any meaningful similarity to any of the others. The worst part of it all is that this game, like DIRT 3, is far from a bad game, it has all the elements it needs to be excellent... but unlike DIRT 3, it just isn't excellent at all, and I don't know how they managed to so spectacularly fail to put any of the pieces together when it was all right in front of them.
I'm just going to play DIRT 2 again and forget this game exists. Shouldn't be too hard, since the only memorable aspect of this game is that you can have Nicky Grist as your co-driver.
(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#dirt-4)
burnoutenjoyer
1 year ago
The game is just so soulless it's unbelievable, from the UI to the tracks it's all just so plain. it's like background noise in the form of video game. It's what you play to burn time while listening to something you're actually paying attention to.
I don't get why can't they just go in the dirt 2/3 direction again instead of swinging between this and rally, and the complete opposite direction that was 5.