Wii Game Review - Colin McRae Dirt 2

» By Nothing2Say | the 01-11-2010 at 12:35 | 26 views (18 unique) | 0 comments | Report post!

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Even from beyond the grave, Colin McRae is the biggest noise in rally games. As proof, witness Dirt 2 on Wii, marking the first appearance of the highly regarded series on a Nintendo console, and our consequent assumption that we’re guaranteed a top-quality rally experience simply because of the name and the pedigree of the earlier games on other formats.

Sadly, it’s not great news for the great man, as this is a game that suffers enormously from the loss of its technical prowess in a Wii conversion that seems to be little more than an afterthought. It does all the basic things you’d expect from a rally game. There are off-road courses set in different global locations and a selection of vehicles to send power-sliding across gravel, pavement, snow and mud tracks. The cars get dirty and dented as the race progresses, and there’s a career mode where you compete for medals to unlock the next set of challenges. Kick its wheels and it seems structurally sound.

But once you get it out on the road it drives like a cut-and-shut job made from the chassis of a Vespa and the castors off a shopping trolley. It’s a featherlight vehicle prone to sliding sideways seemingly of its own accord, and it glides over any surface like it’s powered by some kind of anti-gravity lawnmower engine.

When you’re expecting something full of beefy power and muck-spraying traction, it’s surprising to find that your 400bhp beast of a car never feels like it’s actually connected to the road surface. When you feather the throttle to correct a drift in the, erm, proper Colin McRae games you experience the thrill of fighting realistic physics to bring your car back under control, the back end fishtailing as the wheels scrabble for grip in the dirt. Nothing much like that really happens in this version.

Slow down a bit and you’ll make it around the corner. Go too fast and you’ll slide into a barrier that will ease you back onto the right path. If there’s no barrier, then you’ll get reset onto the track as soon as you’ve even thought about cutting over the grass on that hairpin, and even if you slid off the track with the pursuing pack of racers growling into your tailpipe, the reset is so fast and generous that you’ll still be in the lead when it warps you back onto the road.

That pack of racers deserves a special mention, purely because it’s only three cars strong. Are there any drivers behind the opaque slate windows? You certainly wouldn’t know it on the easiest level of the World Tour mode, which you’re forced to endure before you can try anything more challenging. There they just pootle along as slowly as possible, obligingly piling up on the most innocuous of obstacles to let you past if some act of God causes you to fall behind.

The difficulty level becomes a little bit more challenging towards the more advanced portions of the game, but we don’t reckon many people with a good grounding in driving games of any type will ever have their pulse quickened by Dirt 2. On the positive side, the framerate is generally very smooth, which is always a good thing to see in a racing game. Except when you’re going around some corners, where it judders a bit, but that’s not too problematic at Dirt 2’s generally sedate speed.

Back with the negatives, the way they’ve managed to get it (mostly) moving so greasy-slick appears to be by omitting any notable trackside detail and blurring the textures to a level of fidelity that seems to be reminiscent of early N64 quality. If you flip the car over in the exterior view you’ll notice that the underside is coated with what looks like a sheet of greyish cardboard painted in a pattern that might, if you’re squinting through fog, appear vaguely reminiscent of the bottom of some sort of motor vehicle.

Using the bumper camera, because there’s no cockpit view, i kept getting distracted by a big blocky shadow moving across the foreground, creating an optical illusion that didn’t exactly help the accuracy of my steering. It’s some sort of real-time lighting effect, with the car casting a shadow depending on where the sun is. It looks okay from the outside of the car but is rather off-putting when you’re trying to concentrate on the road.

Dirt 2 plays like a pared down facsimile of an excellent game, bearing little more resemblance to its parent title than the token GBA conversions used to back in the day. It’s not as if this couldn’t be done on Wii. It’s more like nobody really cared (or possibly paid) enough to give it a proper try.

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