I picked up DiRT Rally 2.0 (henceforth DR2) on Green Man Gaming, the whole Game of the Year/Super Deluxe Edition with everything including the kitchen sink. It looks great and the GOTY edition has about three dozen cars already unlocked and bought for the player. For a Rally or Rallycross enthusiast, it have lots of content... or at least it seems to.
Sadly, there are some disappointments if you, like me, have already played DiRT 4 (henceforth D4) with its own Rally and Rallycross modes. D4, like the later DR2, has a team mode, but whereas DR2 just basically has you employing a few folks like engineers who will give you some attributes and unlocks, D4 had a whole team structure with a chief engineer, other engineers, a PR person and others. Also there were several facilities you can buy, like larger garages to hold more cars and a better parts department so you can get repair parts cheaper. And an R&D department. You even have a catering department! Additionally your Team in D4 has sponsors which will kick in extra money for achieving certain criteria during a rally, like winning X number of stages or having a clean run. And as part of the sponsorship system, you can design your own liveries for your cars and your sponsor logos will be added to it. All that is missing from DiRT Rally 2.0 and so it lacks the immersive feel of being on a team.
One of the draws of DiRT Rally 2.0 are the amazingly detailed stages. In the GOTY package there are eleven rally locations, which is quite a nice number. However, just like in the original DiRT Rally game, the individual stages of each rally event at each location are just segments of the one course present at each location. Of course, for variety the stages might be run in reverse direction, or in different weather or different lighting conditions. However, in the four hours I've played DR2 I've come across at least a half dozen times where I'm running a stage on the part of the course I've run there at least once before. This was what finally drove me to give up on the original DiRT Rally game after about 45 hours, that even though I might be driving a different class of car, at a different time in different weather, it was the same old set of segments I'd run a dozen times before. I even started giving some of the rocks and trees names because I've run into them so often
One of the appeals of the older DiRT 4 game is that for rallies it uses the "Your Stage" system. This system randomly generates a rally stage based on a series of parameters like location, length, complexity, time of day and weather. And once generated you can also reverse the stage direction. Now this system can be used to generate your own stages, but it should be noted that all the rallies in the career mode were generated using the "Your Stage" system. So as a result, no two stages are alike, which is a pretty cool thing for a rally game. Sadly Codemasters seemed to have lost interest in using this system for future games.
Anyway, I've rambled on enough. If anyone has questions please post them, I'd love to talk more about rally games
