Machina

User Score
5.5

Presentation - 7.0
Gameplay - 6.5
Value - 3.0

Disappointing. Big fan of Codies racers ordinarily - GRID was my favourite racing game for most of the last generation and I\'ve owned every entry in the DiRT and GRID series since Colin McRae: Dirt. Unfortunately they seem to have dropped the ball here.

+ The racing gameplay is fun.

+ Enjoyed the weather effects and their impact on gameplay.

+ Solid soundtrack.

= Menu presentation is nice I suppose.

= Graphics - neither amazing nor bad, just decent.

= No Gymkhana or drift events. Personally wasn\'t a big fan of it anyway tho the odd event here and there did add a bit of variety to past titles.

= Management elements. Meh.

- Modes have been removed but nothing has been added to take their place, so the game feels hollow/lacking.

- What is there is pretty bare bones, especially the X rally and Landrush stuff (the only two modes involving other cars on the track).

- X rally tracks in particular are tiny and therefore quickly become repetitive and boring, even in their complete varients

- Even the rest of the game feels limited in terms of locations/stages. After a couple of hours you start to think \'hmm, this feels familiar\', by the time I got to 4 1/2 I was sick to death of the repetitiveness. I have never felt this way about a mainline DiRT game before, not even DiRT Rally which was up-front about its lack of content and the reasons for it.

- On top of that a couple of tracks are simply lifted straight out of DiRT Rally... That\'s just lazy.

This is without a doubt the worst of the mainline DiRT games for its time - even the lacklustre experiment that was DiRT ShowDown gives it a run for its money.