Dirt 3 First Impressions

For those who have been waiting for the next great racer either on a console or the PC, Dirt 3’s release last week was a welcomed one. Even more so after the reviews started pouring in with ratings averaging 90%. I was a little slow on the uptake to take the game for a test drive, but did this past weekend, and have just one word to sum it up so far:

“Wow.”

See, I could conclude this news post right there, because “Wow.” couldn’t explain this game better. It’s polished like no other, has a great soundtrack and excellent audio in general, the graphics are incredible, and to top it all off, the gameplay is spot-on. Even the announcers have been done right, giving you realistic encouragement and giving you an overall feeling of satisfaction.

The game starts you off as you’d expect with minimal choice between cars and teams, but as you progress, there’s a lot to unlock and many different races to explore. I’m about four hours into the game so far and have already seen a good bulk of the races, but all have proven quite challenging so far, and a whole lot of fun. The intense graphics seen here help with the immersion-factor… this is a serious feast for the eyes.

To help keep things interesting, there are a couple of different modes aside from simple racing. For drifters, there’s a lot to love here, and four medal levels assure that there will be a lot of fine-tuning your technique, or at least trying a level over and over until you reach Platinum. The same goes for Gymkhana events, which have you try to break through as many boxes as possible before the time runs out. In my limited experience with the game so far, it’s a lot harder to reach Platinum level here than in the drift races.

Although I am still regularly playing Test Drive Unlimited 2, Dirt 3 is proving to be a wicked diversion. Its physics and gameplay simply can’t be compared, and it truly feels realistic. The game’s overall polish adds up to make this the racing game to beat, and I’m confident in saying that it will remain the king for a while.

Thanks to its great graphics, we’ve been using Dirt 2 as a benchmark for a while, and as soon as we’re able to make the change, we’ll be upgrading to Dirt 3. The game takes full advantage of DirectX 11, and offers a ton of tweak-ability, so it’s perfect for inclusion. Though I don’t have performance data up to this point, I can say that with maxed-out details at 1920×1200, I average out to about 66 FPS (according to the in-game benchmark).

If time allows, I might end up writing up a proper review for the game, and given how addictive it’s proven to be up to this point, I do foresee a fair amount of Dirt 3 playtime in my future, so it could happen.