The purer side of Dirt has always been with it's Rally games. After all, that's where it began for the series with the Colin McRae Rally titles in the late 90's.
The rebrand of the series has led to a mixed bag, varying from "meh" to "very good" over the years, and the consistency has spiked way too erratically to make it a truly great series when matched up against the true greats of the gaming world. However, providing a high level simulation racing experience has always been the ace in the hole when it comes to a true rally experience.
Dirt Rally 2.0 is the successor to Dirt Rally, and improves on the original in almost every sense.
You'll have the option to tackle traditional rally, with extended options to do this over a variety of different eras in time, allowing you to experience rally driving from the most iconic time periods for the sport. This is directly linked to the excellent catalogue of vehicles you'll be able to drive, all of which handle according to their time era, as vehicles gradually become more powerful as you progress into the more modern eras. From the Mini Cooper, to the Ford Escort MK2, to the Audi Sport Quattro S1 E2 - the vast array of vehicles is one of the strongest suits of the game.
There's also a strong focus on Rallycross - A more traditional racing discipline - simultaneously competing on a track by thrashing powerful vehicles around tight knit circuits of mixed terrain. In fact, the wealth of game modes is very impressive. Outside of traditional rally and rallycross, you can partake in time trials against the rest of the Dirt Rally community or compete in daily challenges to place you on a leaderboard. A Freeroam Mode, where you can make your own championships and races, offers maximum flexibility and a Career Mode for both rally and rallycross variants adds something more structured for those that don't want to make their own. The Career had a heavy focus in Dirt Rally, but these modes are directly omitted from the trophy list, so naturally took more of a backseat this time round.
All truly great simulations are dependent on their realism, and this is another area where Dirt Rally 2.0 excels. Cars sound authentic, whether it be revving them up on the start line, or gliding through a gravelly corner. Weather effects are also spot on, from torrential rain glistening off tarmac to snowy Scandanvian forestry. Play from helmet cam to level up the experience and the added challenge of navigating the rain hammering the windshield or dense fog obscuring your view.
The damage model is also extensive and really adds layers to the gameplay. For example, destroying your headlights during a night stage is catastrophic to visibility. Damaging the brakes will impact cornering ability. Radiator leaks will cause you to gradually lose horsepower. You'll have a set amount of time to fix up your vehicle between stages, but repairs are limited to 30 minutes and more damage costs more time, so this adds another strategic gameplay element to consider that lends perfectly to the simulation aspect.
There are a couple of big changes. The rewind feature, which previously allowed you to correct errors, has been removed entirely. The Career Mode has been stripped back in terms of depth, and has way less meat on the bones - It's clear the focused efforts went towards other parts of the game this time. More controversially, some of the content from Dirt Rally has been carried over but sits behind DLC content, which you'll need to buy to unlock. This makes the lineup of tracks and locations seem a little on the bare side at outset. Aside this it's still a really polished, detailed package, and one of my favourite additions to the Dirt series. Dirt 5 was a really underwhelming experience, so it was nice to jump back into something that just felt a little bit more like it.
Regarding trophies, this is a large-sized list, clocking in at 51 trophies, including the Platinum, and you'll need to explore this game vast and wide to unlock the entirety of the list. The majority of the game modes share a focus here, to a lesser and greater extent, and we started with the "Rally Through the Ages" mode.
The most important thing to underpin this whole list with, is the fact that, this Platinum trophy is not difficulty dependent at any point. You have the flexibility to tackle every test in this list to whatever difficulty challenge you wish. This can be altered in the gameplay menus on a sliding scale of 0-100. As I mostly always do, I tackled this game on the "Hard" difficulty setting. This kicks in when the slider is set to 81 or higher, and I chose 81 throughout the entirety of the experience.
As a sub-section to difficulty, you can also choose to play with or without Hardcore damage settings. Hardcore damage affects vehicle performance, whereas damage is reduced to purely cosmetics if it's switched off - A clear difference in challenge levels. I always played with Hardcore damage on, as there are some trophies in the list which require this enabled.
Into the "Rally Through the Ages" mode, where you can focus on collecting 5 trophies for winning a Championship in each rally era. These include Classic, Back to the 80's, Modern Classics and Present Day. Each era consists of 3 Championships to choose from, and you only need to win one of these for each of the trophies. The additional fifth trophy is awarded for completing 3 championships within 1 era. This does have to be specifically within the Historic era, so you don't have any flexibility here.
Each Championship contains 3 to 4 events, with 4 to 5 stages in each event, so they're fairly sizable, and whilst you only need to win 1 of each, a full Championship will take around 2-3 hours. At the "Hard" difficulty level, this was a reasonable challenge. AI drivers are capable of posting some good times, and if you're playing with Hardcore damage enabled, keeping your car healthy is really important. You can repair it between stages, but any significant mistakes leading to damage and time penalties for costly repairs will set you back, and these penalties are very unforgiving on harder difficulties against solid AI.
I used this mode as my learning curve for the game, so it took me a handful of attempts, and I never won a Championship first time round. I tried switching up my car choices regularly after losses, just in order to find the one I was most comfortable with, but I ultimately found that developing consistency through steady driving was the best way to post winning times. If you lose control and significantly damage your vehicle, it'll cost you the rest of the Championship.
At 2-3 hours per Championship, this does accumulate time-wise, and whilst I was progressing through each of the individual trophies, I was unlocking a lot of the list through natural play. Losing Championships, sometimes by mere seconds, did take it's toll, and I broke away from this mode just to cleanse the palette every now and again, which was also another way to focus on other parts of the trophy list at intervals outside of this exercise.
This mode was where I spent the most amount of time with the game, and I completely appreciate that I wasn't forced into playing on the challenging end of the difficultly scale, but I've always been the one to push myself in situations where it comes down to dictating difficulty myself, and I have always considered this to be a factor when assessing trophy lists. The game would only become a process-driven checklist exercise on a lower difficulty choice, and not befitting of the thrill that comes with Rally racing.
The other main focus saw us turn our attention to Rallycross. Dirt Rally 2.0 still has an official licensing partnership with the FIA World Rallycross Championship, and as a result, this mode is yet again featured in the game and comes with a series of trophies attached to it.
The "World RX Champion" trophy, awarded for Winning 8 Events in the FIA World Rallycross Championship mode, requires further mastery to the game. In a very similarly long-winded sense as Rally, Rallycross Championships are broken down into stages. There are 4 qualifiers where you race 4 laps within groups of 5 drivers, and the most points are awarded for the fastest completion time until all 4 qualifiers are complete. From here, the top 12 advance to a 6 lap semi-final, where the top 3 race finishers are thrown into another 6 lap final, where the winner is awarded maximum points, which then scales down by position accordingly.
You'll need to win 8 of these events specifically within the FIA World Rallycross Championship mode. Going from Rally to Rallycross was a tough transition, and manoeuvring powerful cars around tight circuits is a completely different skillset to Rally. Again, maintaining a "Hard" difficulty for this challenge stood out here. The AI lap times are very good, and required me to develop a reasonable foundation of practice to hold my own here. Due to the fact you race in groups, you never see what 3/4 of the field have posted time-wise until you complete your own individual qualifier, so even when I felt sharp, it sometimes wasn't as good as I thought compared to the rest of the field.
There are also other strategic nuances thrown in that add layers of intrigue. There's an extended route for each track called the Joker and each driver has to take this once per race. You can take it for any lap you want, but when you take it is based on when you believe it's strategically best to do so. Most tracks also contain mixed terrains. You can go from mud to tarmac very quickly and maintaining speed and control through these transitions can be difficult.
I found it tough to adapt to at first after spending so long with Rally, and it felt like it took me way more practice to find a rhythm when whipping these cars around circuit tracks than anticipated. Also, for reasons that completely escape me, I initially thought this trophy was awarded for just winning the Championship overall, so I wasn't even that focused on trying to win individual events.
There are 11 events in the Championship, and whilst I wasn't winning that many, I was managing to maintain enough consistency to stay within arms reach of top spot. If I had a bad event, for example, did not qualify, or terminated my vehicle with a heavy collision, I would just restart it. The aim was always to at least make it into the top 12 and out of the qualifiers, but it turned out none of this mattered anyway because you only have to win 8 individual events, and it also turns out this can be done across different playthroughs so the Championship doesn't even matter anyway.
I went through all 11 events, restarting them numerous times, and ended up artificially extending the length of time it took to achieve this trophy. That's absolutely my own fault and another lesson in understanding trophy requirements properly. I only noticed this when I managed to win the Championship through only winning 6 of the 11 events but wondering why I never triggered a trophy notification. It wasn't a terrible situation to resolve. I just booted up a brand new Championship and won the first 2 events to unlock the trophy, but there was a lot of unnecessary toil here.
Once this is complete, there's not much left standing in your way. The remainder of the list focuses on a plethora of other activities. Custom events, purchasing vehicles of specific classes and indulging in the online community events are all accounted for. The game does contain a traditional competitive online offering, but none of the trophies in this list are dedicated to it, and the participation of any such thing is limited to the community leaderboards.
The "UPGRADED" trophy, awarded for Fully researching and applying the maximum engine upgrade to 5 cars, is worth noting for it's unexpectedly grindy nature. Each vehicle has between 4-6 engine upgrade levels, which are levelled up through purely driving a certain amount of miles with that given vehicle. Nothing overly demanding, however, the main issue with this trophy is the fact that mileage only counts in the MyTeam Career mode, and the trophy list completely bypasses this mode right up to this point. It meant all the mileage I'd accumulated in other modes focusing on the rest of the trophy list wasn't accounted for, so the majority of the vehicles had to be upgraded from scratch.
The Career mode just throws a randomly generated Championship at you to tackle, and your mileage progress will accumulate after each stage. You can see the engine level progress for each car in the Garage menu, but it's not made clear specifically how many miles it takes to reach the maximum engine capacity. It's no more than a casual driving exercise in reality, but if you have to start from scratch on all 5 cars like I had to, it will take around 8-10 hours to fully upgrade the 5 cars required for the trophy.
You can choose the most sensible route to the finish, and focus on the couple of starting cars with 4 engine upgrades, but all the other vehicles in the game have either 5 or 6 engine upgrades. I would avoid the Rallycross cars. They all have 6 engine upgrades, and the mileage from Rallycross tracks is much shorter in comparison to Rally routes, so it's definitely more time-efficient to stick to Rally vehicles for this exercise. It was actually a somewhat surprising grind. I didn't expect this to be the trophy that held up the clean up progress outside of the previously discussed trophies.
The rest of the list is formed of a multitude of smaller tasks that can be completed without any real dedication. There are also plenty of opportunities to tandem these trophies up and work towards some of them simultaneously alongside one another, reducing the time required throughout the clean up process.
One final thing to just touch upon is the fact that you'll need to spend a fair amount of credits purchasing vehicles in conjunction with a small handful of these remaining trophies. You'll need to purchase 4 Group A and Group B cars and some cars will also need to be purchased for a few car-specific trophy requirements. Depending on whether you buy them new or used, this will still collectively cost within the range of 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 credits, so make sure you've got the money available and don't spend unless it's within accordance with what you need to complete the list.
In a slightly annoying nuance too, the car showroom will only display a certain range of cars at any one time, and this refreshes on a 6 hour cycle. It means you may need to wait to buy certain cars you'll need for trophies. It's not a major inconvenience, but it does add a sprinkle of RNG.
The overall difficulty of this Platinum is ultimately what you make of it. This rating could be as low as a 1 if you choose to play under the least challenging circumstances. Even on "Hard" difficulty, outside the adaptation from Rally to Rallycross, the game doesn't really hold that steep of a challenge. It's slightly lengthy, but important to remember that the amount of time I spent on this list is in direct correlation to the difficulty level. You'll run through the whole game without any time spent on practice or failure if you choose the easiest difficulty, and this means the entire list could probably be done within sub-25 hours.
As it stood for me, I'd estimate the overall completion time to be at least double this, and outside of a couple of difficulty spikes, an average rating feels about right for where this sits on the scale.
Notable Trophies -
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| World RX Champion - Win 8 Events in the FIA World Rallycross Championship mode. UPGRADED - Fully research and apply the maximum engine upgrade to 5 cars. |
Hardest Trophy -
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