Dirt 2 Updated Hands-on

When we first saw Dirt 2 properly before E3, we were impressed with how the gameplay was shaping up, new events on show, and the new engine present in all its muddy glory. Since then, we recently got a chance to sit down and play with a near-final build of the game that showed all the race types, how the single-player mode will work, and some multiplayer action.

The marquee events in the single-player tour are the three X-games-branded tournaments, which you open up at regular intervals after achieving a certain amount of success in the standard tour. There are three available--Europe, Asia, and America--which are of increasing difficulty. You can expect to be able to enter the European leg after an hour or so of gameplay.

The X-Games are mixed-discipline three-race events: a quarterfinal, a semifinal and a final. If you finish in the top four in the first two, you make it to the final where you get to go for a podium finish or even an X-Games gold medal. The three events are scattered across the continent in question; in Europe you have a Raid in Croatia--a mix of trucks and buggies charging across a point-to-point course; in Morocco, you have a good old-fashioned Rally; and in London, you have a Rally Cross final around one of the Battersea Power Station tracks.

The second X-games event, in Asia, has a very similar setup, with a Raid event followed by a Trailblazer race--similar to a Rally, but with other cars on the course, thanks to close but staggered starts--and another Rally Cross final. The setup to the stadium rally cross finals is a good one; when you're battling out for first place against some of the game's biggest names--Dave Mirra, Travis Pastrana, and Ken Block feature in Asia, for instance--it really is satisfying to be able to dump your rivals into a wall before taking gold.

These events with their tightly packed Rally Cross finales do act as great highlights in the career season; the finals themselves tend to be packed out with the game's more vocal characters you'll have raced against repeatedly getting to the X-Games and involve lots of radio chatter, as well as personal rivalries being played out on the track. While this is hardly a new feature for racing games, it is nice to see it being implemented well and giving you a sense of personal satisfaction for beating particular opponents.

Your reward for winning an X-Games event is a brand-new branded car and a shedload of both cash and experience points, edging you closer to the next level of events. Dirt 2's Career mode is driven by both and doesn't attempt to thread a story through it--all you need to pay attention to is the amount of money you have in the bank, what events you're eligible for, what your rivals think of you.

The game is looking better and better--as mentioned previously, the way that mud spatters up off the track is impressively realistic, with some of the messier tracks leaving your previously logo-covered car a uniform shade of brown by the end, especially if you happen to roll yourself through a puddle. We also got our first proper taste of the game's soundtrack when taking a look at the extended single-player campaign, and there's a good mix of upbeat pop from the likes of Ladyhawke to indie rock from Scottish rockers Franz Ferdinand, as well as other more generic fare that fits well with the game's corporate extreme sports lifestyle atmosphere.

After cutting our teeth in the single-player races to drag ourselves up to and through the X-games, we got the chance to indulge in a spot of multiplayer racing, which turned out to be equally satisfying.

The multiplayer systems we got to test out involved making playlists for events and vehicle types and then racing them, logically enough. You can mix and match event types in a playlist at will and--this is where it gets silly--you can also mix and match vehicle types, throwing together combinations that you'd never see in the main Career mode. Racing down point-to-point gravel courses intended for hardcore rallying in speedy rally cross cars or racing lumbering trucks through courses packed with narrow hairpins can lead to much silliness. Thankfully, the game will tell you when you make choices that are out of line with the recommendations for the track in question, and you can lock your options so that you only get shown appropriate vehicles for any given track selection.

You can also lock options in so that racers are all in manual cars and can't tune their cars before the race. Normally, you can tweak everything from ride height to shift times and brake balance to speed things up as you go along.

Even standard point-to-point rallies work well in this mode, as you see the ghost of whomever you're racing against live on your screen. So you can see just how well you're doing without having to actually worry about your opponent's track position. The rough-and-tumble rally cross events are really good fun, with all the tracks we played on featuring lots of overtaking opportunities due to the width of many of the corners and the ability to find extra room on much of the course to nip around your opponents.

The one problem with multiplayer is the lack of options for AI opponents in rally cross or raid events. When you're system linking to get two-player local multiplayer, many of the courses can seem empty, and you may be used to bombing around the tracks in question with seven other racers. The lack of other local multiplayer is hardly a surprise in this day and age, but it's still a shame not to have the option for split-screen fun.

Dirt 2 is shaping up to build really well on the good work put down in opening up the Colin McRae franchise beyond the pure rallying world in the first Dirt game. While we still have yet to be convinced that the expansion of the "action sports lifestyle" isn't just an excuse to shoehorn in even more in-game advertising--hearing the event DJs talk about DC Shoes or catching sight of cans of branded energy drinks in your RV add nothing to the game--the gameplay currently looks to be both solid and very good fun indeed. Dirt 2 is unlikely to be a racing game to please the purists, but it could well be a whole hell of a lot of fun.