The previous Dirt game was “Dirt Rally”, so you need to take notice that this is Dirt 4, and not Dirt Rally 2. Dirt Rally was really difficult and was supposed to be more of a hardcore rally simulation. This game seems a bit more forgiving, but yet it seems fairly similar in its presentation considering the likes of Dirt 2 and 3 seemed like they were trying too hard to be “cool” and relevant.
In terms of difficulty, you can choose from a few different presets, but then can fine tune it from there. There’s no rewind feature, but you have a limited number of restarts.
In Career mode, you initially only have access to Rally until you unlock the other modes: Land Rush, RallyCross, and Historic.
When you create your own team, you create a livery, then get to hire staff, and upgrade the facilities. Each facility has a different “level” requirement, and a price, so you need to win races and earn XP and cash, then come back to upgrade.
You can purchase second-hand cars in the Classifieds menu, or brand new ones. If you choose to race for another team, they take a cut of your earnings.
There’s a feature that procedurally generates rally stages based on a few parameters. I assume this was used to generate the stages during the career mode for the standard rallys stages. There’s not that many locales which is probably due to this generation feature. There is: USA, Australia, Spain, Wales, Sweden.
In Rally, you play multiple races in each stage, and there can be many stages to the competition. The final event is all the tracks across all the countries so takes some time to complete. In each race - once you pass the finish line, you have to drive up to the marshall. No idea what the point of that was, but it's the only rally game I have seen do that.
Land Rush and Rally Cross is structured in a way where you play 2 rounds on the same track. With Land Rush, I found it hard to keep the cars from spinning out, and even when I did manage, then the computer controlled opponents would just plough into me and spin me around anyway. Personally, I didn’t enjoy this style at all.
In RallyCross, the top 3 advance to the “final” 6. In each race, you need to take a “Joker” lap, which is an alternate and slightly extended route which you have to take once per race.
Personally, I suffered poor framerate especially on Land Rush and Rally Cross - presumably because of the extra cars, and the extra dust they kicked off the ground. When I lowered the settings, then I got a good framerate and I thought the game looked great even on Very Low preset (well, aside from some pixelated trees, but I could increase that back up to Very High without a performance hit).
Despite the event list appearing minimal on first glance, the fact that I didn’t play all Land Rush and Rally Cross events, and I didn’t explore the online mode; I still managed to spend 44 hours in the game.