solid racing game which stops just shy of greatness because none of the tracks are in any way memorable - they’ve gone for a generated-from-prefab-blocks type of track system, which does mean you can generate your own custom ones (though you can’t manually edit individual segments, just influence the parameters of the generation algorithm) and they’re equally convincing versus the predefined ones, but there’s nothing to distinguish them
there’s a real deep state of focus you enter where you’re just focused on the road ahead and listening to your co-driver’s course notes, and that’s fun in and of itself, but there’s no track you’d ever go “damn, I want to improve my time on that one” because they’re all so completely indistinguishable
there have been games which did this kind of track generation before - I played hundreds of hours of V-Rally 2 as a kid - but I still remember those tracks; SS01 Australia is burned into my brain like it’s the route to the local shops and I’m hungry - something doesn’t quite stick to your brain with the ones in Dirt 4
excellent fun with a good wheel, but I wish it were more interested in the tracks as a place, rather than just an immediately-discardable result of an algorithm's execution
there’s a real deep state of focus you enter where you’re just focused on the road ahead and listening to your co-driver’s course notes, and that’s fun in and of itself, but there’s no track you’d ever go “damn, I want to improve my time on that one” because they’re all so completely indistinguishable
there have been games which did this kind of track generation before - I played hundreds of hours of V-Rally 2 as a kid - but I still remember those tracks; SS01 Australia is burned into my brain like it’s the route to the local shops and I’m hungry - something doesn’t quite stick to your brain with the ones in Dirt 4
excellent fun with a good wheel, but I wish it were more interested in the tracks as a place, rather than just an immediately-discardable result of an algorithm's execution