Dirt Rally 2.0 Review

Almost every racing game is a conversation with other cars. Rally is a conversation with a road you cannot see, and Dirt Rally 2.0 is the best version of it anybody has shipped. The co driver reads the corner ahead in numbers and you commit before the crest reveals whether the call was generous, which is a trust exercise no other genre asks for. Codemasters then made the surface itself dynamic, so a stage run late in the running order has ruts cut into it by everyone ahead of you and demands different lines and different tyres than the same stage run first.

Damage carries between stages with a limited service window to fix it, and the career mode does not offer a rewind, so a snapped driveshaft on stage two is simply the rest of your weekend. The historic cars are the highlight, all inertia and no aids, genuinely frightening in the wet. The rallycross licence is a pleasant side dish, the season pass pricing annoyed everyone, and the learning curve is steep enough that pad players need real patience.