A lot of racing games – especially those centered around dirt – aren’t so much about picking perfect lines and maintaining drag coefficients, and are instead entirely about hurtling yourself bodily-and-vehicularly down a country road going inconceivably fast. Your goal in these latter games is simple survival: if you completed a race, you’re doing amazing, sweetie. Rally racing games especially value completion over domination, where often and counterintuitively, the best way to score stage and event wins is simply to finish in better condition than your opponents. You have to complete stages faster than everyone else, sure, but more importantly: you just gotta complete the stage, man.
In DiRT Rally, you are a competitor in the World Rally Championship, a real international competition where the best drivers in the world tackle the most challenging off-road courses known to mankind. Your task is to battle the elements, master dirt, gravel, snow and mud, and emerge victorious. Unlike its sister game, DiRT 5, there is no overarching storyline to contend with; it’s just you, your copilot, and the open backroads of the world. In that way, DiRT Rally is meant to be a racing simulator, putting players in as close to a driver’s seat as possible. Courses are unforgiving, and anyone coming at this game from the perspective of a casual racer is going to find themselves in deep shit very quickly.
Because of the game’s promised verisimilitude, messing up during a race has consequences, particularly when it comes to lost time. If you go off the track, you can of course “recover your car,” but it costs you as many as 15 seconds of race time. The same goes for any race-time repairs. If a tire gets punctured, for example, you lose 10 seconds off your stage time to fix it yourself. Additionally, as your car gets damaged, you can actually see the deleterious effects of that damage in real time, such as when you take too many frontal collisions and your radiator starts going out on you. Suddenly, the car becomes harder to drive. Because there’s no tutorial, new players can expect to experience this kind of damage in spades as they slowly get used to this system. The thing is, DiRT Rally is still a video game; the simulation can’t cover everything that might happen to a driver. This area out of the simulation’s reach is where the true horror of DiRT Rally resides.
Did you know you can drive off a cliff in Monaco on accident, rolling down the sheer face of a mountain and ending your contention in the event? That’s pretty wild, right? You can just move on to the next race, and not think about how you and your copilot definitely died in that accident. Roll cages, schmoll cages – nobody survives a 500-foot tumble in a 1962 Mini Cooper. Did you collide with a tree at nearly 100 miles an hour? You’re dead. Did an errant piece of course geometry send your car flipping for dozens of yards before finally coming to rest upside down, radiator busted? Maybe you don’t die here, but you’re likely significantly injured! To say nothing of your copilot! Sometimes, after particularly nasty collisions I’ll sit there for a second before resuming my race and the copilot will give me the next corner intensity in a very hushed tone, as if they also know they just died.
Playing DiRT Rally as an inexperienced driver is like watching a Final Destination near-death experience scene over and over and over. Every time I recover my car, I’m more or less unscathed, albeit down another 15 seconds and suffering from brake damage. As I get better, these accidents become less frequent, but they still happen, just to remind me that real rally racing is extremely fucking dangerous, and only the most exquisitely trained professionals should attempt this sport.