DiRT 3

Preview from Luke - Friday, 06 May 2011 @ 5:37pm

When you think Rally games you can’t really look past the king of them all, the Colin McRae Rally series. This year Codemasters is looking to push the boundaries on this franchise by delivering an even more defining rally experience and taking it for a ride down the social network road.

I got to go for a spin in a few different stages that were on offer for the day, some of these alternated between day and night cycles, as well as having dynamic weather effects. After picking which strage you would like to go rip up you’re left with also selecting a ride. There seems to be a decent amount of cars to choose from, these range from you’re standard rally cars that you see all the time, to some really unique cars in the crazy “Group B” range. This Group B selection offers vehicles that aren’t exactly safe for driving in rally situations, which is what makes them that much more fun to drive.

As soon as everything fires up and you’re on that starting line one of the first things you’ll notice is that this game looks fantastic. Launching through that first turn as dust bellows out from under your tyres just looks truly amazing. One thing that you’ll be able to do which will show off its looks is in the middle of the race you can pause the game and jump straight into a replay to see that epic crash that might have happened right in front of you. It’s a neat little feature where you rewind and slow everything right down, then when you’re done admiring you can jump straight back into the race.

One of the brand new modes that is being introduced is something that I’m sure A LOT of people out there have seen. You know those videos with Ken Block doing that absolutely insane shit in his car, well they are dragging some of that into this game as well. Gymkhana throws the player into a course littered with obstacles for them to perform different driving techniques with. You gain points depending on what it is that you perform and the objective is to basically outscore the other opponents. This mode was a stack of fun and combining this with the replay system you can check out some of your crazy manoeuvres that you pull off.

Lastly, like a lot of games these days Codemasters have decided to drop a few social networking features into this title. Take for example their video recording system, you'll be able to upload you're crazy driving videos for all to enjoy. Now we have seen games do this in the past where you drop videos onto their community built site, but the great thing about DiRT 3 is that this one is dumps your videos directly to YouTube.

DiRT 3 is shaping up to be another fantastic addition to the series, but we will have to wait and see if they can outdo the last. Look out for the game in May on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.