Platinum Difficulty Rating - 7/10Out of 3 previously reviewed DiRT titles (DiRT 2, DiRT 3 and Showdown), there has never been a game that has breached past a 7/10 for difficulty rating, and DiRT Rally doesn't quite get there either.
Where these previous titles have had an emphasis on a variety of Motorsport activities, this is the first title since the original Colin McRae Rally games, last seen on the Playstation 2, which has contained a heavy focus on the concept of Rally.
The list is split very evenly across a range of different aspects to this game, including the Career mode, Online events, Online PvP and other various adhoc tasks.
The meat of the game, as always, is based around the Career mode, but has a slightly different take on progression in comparison to previous DiRT titles.
Before, you would progress through the career via a series of events, and winning these events would subsequently unlock further events to compete in until you reached the final tier. It was a very linear model which was carried through the series across all of the previous titles prior to this one. DiRT Rally follows a league format, where you compete in events which are made up of a specific number of stages, and the quicker you are across these stages, the higher you'll finish within an event. The closer you are to the top spot after each event, the more points you'll earn towards the overall league table. The top 3 drivers are promoted to the next league, and the bottom 3 drivers are relegated back down to the previous league, and this format is followed across the game's 3 disciplines of racing (Rally, RallyCross and Hillclimb).
The difficulty of the Career mode is determined based on which league you're in. You'll start at Open level and end at Masters level, with a total of 5 different leagues to climb through, with each level becoming progressively more challenging.
The "Born to Run" trophy, awarded for Becoming Champion at Masters level in Championships, is the most difficult trophy on the list, but strangely enough, is also where the game loses a few possible extra marks for difficulty at the same time. Just to make this clear from the off, the game can be unforgivably challenging, but this also depends on which discipline you're playing. The requirements of the trophy only task you with becoming a Champion at Masters level in just 1 of the 3 previously mentioned disciplines, so you have some very lenient flexibility to work with here. Rally is tough to the point where I genuinely don't think I'd ever win at Masters level, whereas Hillclimb, which was the discipline I ended up unlocking this trophy for, is still tough, but makes the trophy much more realistically achievable.
For a game that has previously prided it's trophy lists on maximum completion, to effectively allow the player to be able to bypass the majority of it's Career mode options is definitely a change of direction.
However, there are also a small collection of trophies on offer which will which require you to win a Championship using a variety of cars from different Rally classes, so even if you choose to avoid the Rally discipline for the purposes of the trophy above, you won't be able to escape it entirely if you want to unlock the Platinum trophy. The most efficient way to achieve this is to win a Championship at Open level, promoting you to Clubman level, and then retire events until you're relegated back down to Open, repeating this process for the 5 trophies you'll need to unlock which require you to explore 5 different vehicle classes. This also keeps the game as simple as possible, and means you won't have to reach the upper tiers of Rally Championships to attempt to unlock these trophies, which should keep things manageable. Be warned though, Rally is still challenging, even at Open level, so this will give you a few problems if your skills aren't up to scratch.
Away from the Career mode, there is also a fairly big emphasis on Online Events, which are a series of challenges pitting you against others to finish as high as possible on a leaderboard based on event completion time. There are 5 further trophies which require you to finish within the top tier of these events, which occur daily on a random rotational basis, and span across different disciplines and tracks. The top 33% times logged by the end of the day will qualify for the top tier, and there are 2 things that are important to note about these trophies.
The first important note is that fact that, naturally, almost 4 years on, there aren't that many people playing this game anymore, so the window for opportunity to actually place within the top tier is much smaller. If you were going for these trophies at the beginning of the game's life cycle, where you were seeing thousands of people log event times each day, it would have been much easier to reach that top tier. This sort of leads onto the second important note, which is the fact only the hardcore DiRT fans are still really playing this game, and are inevitably finding their way into the top of the leaderboards consistently, such is the age of the game, subsequently reducing the availability of qualifying spots to fulfill the requirements of the trophy for others.
Ultimately, if you're good enough, you'll get in, but you're competing against real players, and only the best will achieve that top tier. The major positive is the fact the events are run daily, so you'll have ample opportunities to keep coming back to try again, even if it does mean going back to the Single Player portions of the game to perfect your skills.
The "Dependable" trophy, awarded for Completing a Monthly Event, requires you to just finish a single monthly event, though this does also come with it's own challenges. A monthly event is composed of 24 stages, so damage management is critical to completing the event. Your car will depreciate over time, and this is alot of stages to get through, so you'll need to ensure maximum care, and disregard the element of time, given the fact you merely need to finish the event for the trophy. Too much damage to your car means you won't be able to keep up with the adequate levels of repairs to make it through to the end, and if your car is retired due to excessive damage, you'll be unable to complete the event until next month.
Another issue to watch out for, and another reason why you should disregard time and take care navigating through stages, is the fact that, crashing your car off course in certain stages will retire you automatically. It seems strange, because driving too far off track will reset you with a time penalty, which is fine, but driving off a mountainous ledge, or over a wall, will end your event, and you'll have to wait to compete in next month's instead. I experienced both separate instances of irreparable damage and driving off stage, so I had to wait out 3 months to achieve this trophy, so it's definitely worth mentioning. The event will also take somewhere around 2-3 hours to complete too.
The "Maximum Attack" trophy, awarded for winning every stage on a 12 stage event with all assists off, is easily the most challenging of the adhoc trophies remaining in the list. This replicates the real life simulation of driving a vehicle, where there are no handling assists, disabled HUD and the event is completed within the cockpit from first person perspective. It's very difficult to get the hang of if you're used to the default settings of driver assists and being able to see the HUD and vehicle from an outer perspective. You also need to win every single stage, so if you don't finish top of a particular stage, you'll need to restart it until you do, which means it can also become a very time consuming venture. If you can't master handling the car without any assists, you'll lose control and won't top the stage, so a certain degree of mastery is required here which could take some practice. It was easily the one adhoc trophy I spent the most time on.
Despite the watered down requirements for completion of the Career mode compared to previous DiRT games, DiRT Rally still presents a solid enough challenge to keep things interesting. It also still maintains a pretty decent longevity factor too, clocking in at somewhere between the 50-70 hour mark for full completion. Winning numerous Rally events with different vehicle classes, reaching and winning at Masters level for 1 discipline in Career mode and a generous portion of trophies spread across competitive Multiplayer game modes keep the hours ticking over nicely.
The game also does not have any preset difficulty levels, and is dictated simply by the league level at which you're competing in Career mode and how strong your times are against other players online, both of which will offer a reasonable challenges as a result. It doesn't quite set a new standard based on previous difficulty ratings for other DiRT games, but it's still competing in the upper echelons. Somewhere around Professional to Elite league level, you could say.
Notable Trophies -
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| Born to Run - Become Champion at Masters level in Championships Dependable - Complete a Monthly Event Maximum Attack - Win every stage on a 12 stage event with all assists off |
Born to Run
Become Champion at Masters level in Championships
