Game Details Developer: Codemasters

Publisher: Codemasters

Platform: Windows, PS4 and Xbox One

Release Date: April 5, 2016

Price: $59.99

ESRB Rating: E for Everyone

Links: Steam | Amazon | Official website Codemasters: Codemasters: Windows, PS4 and Xbox OneApril 5, 2016: $59.99: E for Everyone

Formula 1 might be known as the pinnacle of motorsport, but surely the most challenging discipline in racing has to be rallying. Now, in the form of Codemasters' DiRT Rally—available now for the PC on Steam Early Access and arriving on the PS4 and Xbox One on April 5—there's a video game that finally does justice to this sport. More of a simulation than anything that has come before, DiRT Rally may just be one of the hardest racing games we've ever played. It's also one of the very best.

For the uninitiated, rallies are point-to-point races run against the clock. They're run on "stages"—public roads or tracks closed for the occasion, one car after another in a series. Each car has a driver and co-driver. Before the event, they will prepare pace notes—a shorthand list of the route with information about the various corners and hazards—and during each stage, the co-driver handles the navigation duties, calling out that information for the driver.

Those of us who race on purpose-built racetracks quickly memorize the layout, safe in the knowledge that the same corner will be in the same place lap after lap. Rally drivers? Not so much. Not only do they have to race across stages that can be tens of miles long, they do so on dirt or gravel roads where the amount of grip varies from corner to corner. Oh, and they have to run in all weather. Rain, of course, but also snow and ice, depending on the event. As we say—challenging stuff!

Now for a quick confession. As much as I enjoy watching actual rallying, I've never been the biggest fan of rally games. Codemasters' Colin McRae Rally left me cold. The rally stages in Gran Turismo did much the same. The cars always felt as if the handling was unnatural, and I'd sooner find something else to do. Those days are over, I am pleased to report. Within just a few minutes of sitting down with the game, I knew that Codemasters had hit this one out of the park. Paul Coleman, DiRT Rally's chief designer, co-drives in rallies in his spare time, and his passion for and knowledge of the sport shines through the game.

You get to race in a number of different events. There are traditional rallies, where you'll compete against AI drivers on actual stages used by the World Rally Championship (in Greece, Monaco, Germany, Wales , Finland, and Sweden). There are rallycross events, held on circuits that are a mix of tarmac and dirt, where you compete head-to-head against several other cars at the same time. And finally there's the legendary Pikes Peak Hillclimb —which will be held for the 100th time this summer—a 7.5-mile (12km) run up the side of the mountain in Colorado. In addition to single-player events, there are asynchronous online events and leagues as well as real-time PVP rallycross races.

DiRT Rally gives you a range of different cars, picked from different decades of the sport. In the career mode, you start off with low-powered cars from the 1960s, graduating to faster machinery like the lethal Group B monsters of the 1980s or the increasingly technology-packed WRC cars of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. (There are also specific rallycross cars for those events and a pair of famous Peugeots built specially for Pikes Peak.) You can tweak the cars between some of the stages (in keeping with the real thing, where there are mid-event service stages), and as you progress through the game your mechanics and support team will gain skills, making your car better (and repairs faster).

We spoke to Coleman recently to find out more about the history of DiRT Rally and to discover just why it's so challenging. PC gamers who've been playing it for a few months now have made the comparison to Dark Souls, a notoriously difficult action game. "I'm not particularly keen on that analogy, as we never set out to make this the hardest racing game ever made; we set out to make the most authentic rally game ever made," Coleman told us. "Driving the cars isn't actually difficult, it's the roads you have to drive them on. Driving down a 4m-wide goat track in Greece in one of these cars is where the challenge comes from. But if you take it easy and you take it gently down the stages, you'll get through them; you're not going to fall off the road. You're just not going to go very quick!"

This is certainly true. Try running flat-out straight away, and you'll very quickly find yourself in trouble, spinning out or worse—many of the rallies are held on tracks that run across hills or along cliffs, and it's very easy to overcook it and end up at the bottom of a gully.

Codemasters

Codemasters

Codemasters

Codemasters

Codemasters

Codemasters.

Codemasters

Codemasters

The secret sauce that makes DiRT Rally so realistic—and therefore so challenging—is the way the game models the tracks. When development began in 2012, Coleman and his team started off with the engine from DiRT 3, taking authentic stage widths and real roads from actual rally stages, then running cars from DiRT 3 down them.

They quickly found that those cars couldn't cope. "Throwing the old DiRT 3 cars down there didn't work, and we knew we had to rework our simulation engine. We started doing stuff with the engine we had available to us, and we got close, but we were hitting a brick wall in certain areas. And our physics coder at the time was not willing to touch anything. It was an engine we'd been using for 10 years, and he was very unwilling to go into Pandora's box and unravel everything," he said.

A new engine was needed. The hope was to leverage the engine that Codemasters' other racing franchise (the F1 201x games) had built in 2012, but that quickly proved inadequate. "To a naive person, you'd think it would all be the same, but for F1 they're essentially an airplane with wheels. For us it's a very different proposition. The first thing we did when we got a new coder who was willing to unravel all of this stuff was say, 'Okay, the key thing that we have as a racing game that no one else has to deal with is the surface that you drive on.' And when most other games have tarmac, and they can work on the tire model and go from there, we wanted to make sure that the surface tech was right first—that foundation that you build on—and then start working on how the tire interacts with that," Coleman told us.

Coleman and his team started off reading a lot of papers on fluid dynamics to get an understanding of how stones move on top of surfaces. "I'll be honest and say we're not using fluid dynamics for the game, because the CPU power of a home computer or PS4 is not going to cope with that. What we actually do is a simplified model, which is density," he said. "The deeper you dig into a surface, the denser it becomes and the more grip you find. That works for spinning the wheel; it also works for sliding the tire as well."

"Each surface has different properties. The gravel surface you get in Finland is a very compacted, quite fine stone that they use as public roads, whereas the roads in Greece are dirt tracks with very large clumpy sandy rocky gravel. So the density is very different there, and the nature of the road changes quite dramatically even between gravel surfaces." The result is an intuitive experience where things like weight transfer of the car really matters.

Actually modeling real stages was also important to Coleman. "Having these real stages in there—rather than crafting the stages as we'd previously done, designing each corner to be the best corner ever—we were saying this is a road as it's used in real rally events, and we're embracing the fallibility of that. That corner is a nightmare to drive around, because that's what rally is: taking a car down a very inhospitable bit of road and coping with it."

Once the foundation of the surfaces was right, the next step was layering in the tire physics and how they interact with those surfaces. Next were the cars—the engine, the clutch, the gearbox, the drivetrain, and so on—with information gleaned from actual teams, historic cars, and published race reports. The attention to detail becomes evident if you play DiRT Rally with a wheel—you'll quickly notice that a 1960s Mini or Lancia requires a lot more steering to negotiate a turn than a modern WRC car with its ultra-quick steering rack. And all the while it manages to maintain 60fps at 1080p.

And play this game with a wheel you should. Although Coleman expects the controller to be the default input device, with a wheel it becomes utterly convincing—all that's missing compared to the real thing is the cold and the rain.