Dirt 3 Hands-On Preview

Gentlemen and women, start your engines! Dirt 3, the sequel to 2009's well-received off-road racer, is sitting on the starting line and ready to donate some rubber. We recently had a chance to visit Codemasters to take the game for a spin, and if you're looking for a racing title that straddles the line between simulation and floaty arcade sprints, then we may have located a strong contender for your driving dollars.

Dirt 3 builds on the studio's long-standing history with things on four wheels but also does a sharp U-ey to return to the roots of the series. Where Dirt 2 focused on the up-and-comer aspect of career racing as you clawed your way up the food chain, Dirt 3 has its feet firmly planted in professionalism. You've cracked the big time and now you're competing at the highest level.

The most natural new inclusion then is that of Ken Block's Gymkhana mode, which takes place in the DC compound. You'll throw your high-powered rally car around, under, and through various obstacles with a view to posting the quickest possible time while completing a set of predetermined challenges. The space doubles as an interactive lobby environment where you and friends can mess around, trashing the place and doing things that would cause your average mechanic to wake up in the night screaming in terror.

Goals are assigned at the beginning of the Gymkhana round. In our demo we needed to drift through a huge segmented cement pipe, throw our Ford Fiesta sideways through the gap between the wheels of a parked semi-trailer, drive through green foam boxes, do doughnuts around light poles, and stick a landing after taking our car over a sizable jump. Codemasters already knows the effort and time its audience is willing to spend shaving mere fractions of a second off lap and course times, so it hopes that by supporting the mode heavily in Dirt 3, the natural competitive nature of players will fuel the battle to be fastest on the online leaderboards. Offline players after a social head-to-head and pass-the-controller experience will also be pleased to hear that split-screen multiplayer also makes its return in Dirt 3.

On the back of Dirt 2, the development team was shooting for more environmental diversity in the sequel. Dirty and dry is out, and snow and ice are in, bringing with them their own unique driving challenges. Tyre treads will deform circuits, sinking into soft surfaces and leaving grooves that will impact the optimal racing line. Eager to share some of the internally developed tech, Dirt 3 takes advantage of F1 2010's weather system, allowing for time-of-day cycling and letting you rip up the road from sun-up, through mid-morning, into the longer shadows of the afternoon and (thanks to headlights) far into the night.

Not all of Dirt 3's events will be focused on perfecting slides and accelerating pin-perfectly out of the apex. Several new party modes have been added, such as Cat and Mouse, and Infection. The former puts you in 1950s Mini Coopers and group B rally cars as you push a mouse towards the finishing line, with the first driver there taking home the cup. The latter mode covers one car in the game in green goo to create a kind of vehicular zombie combat. The infected car needs to tag others to bring them into the fold. Once turned, infected cars gain zombie vision that shows the location of all other opponents in the game. The last person standing (or sitting, as the case may be) wins.

Of course, it's not all doing circle work in someone's private car playground and hunting. We also hit the Sweden stage and tried our luck navigating through a mixture of dirt, and gravel (the odd bit of bushland) and taking a brief sojourn into small villages. Corner cutting is always an option, but in doing so you invariably also run the risk of hitting obstacles, like inconveniently placed log piles and the uneven edges of roads as they transition into dense scrub. There's an immense sense of satisfaction in finding and nailing that fastest lane and then ripping up the hand brake to nail a tight corner. Our first attempt was done with assists on, and it was a gentle introduction. Disabling them made our approach much more considered with the way we tackled traction and braking distances, and what you lose without helpers you gain in fine control over the vehicle once you've come to grips with its abilities.

The game will include more than 50 cars spanning from the '50s through to the present day, and like the courses they zip across (and even with polish still being added to the game), they are already looking gorgeous. It's great then that Dirt 3 also includes a new video replay mode that lets you watch your run back in a variety of broadcast-style camera angles. Regardless of which platform you're playing on, you'll be able to hit a button, select a 30-second clip of yourself in action, and export the clip directly to the game's dedicated social sharing space and YouTube.

From our time behind the wheel, we're already big fans of the fun but realistic physics, sharp visuals, and potential for online and offline multiplayer matchups. Dirt 3 will be tearing up carparks around Australia on May 26 this year for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.