As popular as it is, the Colin McRae Rally series is getting long in the tooth. The graphics don’t hold a flame to other racing sims in recent years, despite Codemasters slapping a new coat of paint on every year, and the light, arcade-like driving model – that wasn’t particularly good to begin with – now just feels old, stale and clunky. Fortunately, it’s not just fans of the series that have noticed. Codemasters is well aware that the series needs a thorough overhaul and Colin McRae: DIRT is the answer.

Codemasters has reconsidered every element from Colin McRae Rally. Aside from point-to-point rallying, it features a range of other off-road events, like hill climb, rally cross, CORR (Championship Off-road Racing), rally raid and crossover. As you’d expect, such a wide array of events requires a truckload of courses, and DIRT delivers on this front. You’ll find classic courses from Europe, the UK and US, as well as a handful of tracks from Canberra Park.

Under the bonnet, so to speak, are even more changes. Codemasters has thrown out the outdated game engine, replacing it with the new Neon engine. Neon not only drives DIRT’s graphics and terrain, it controls physics and environmental effects. This delivers a better simulation of different road types, produces subtle wind effects, and provides deeper, more accurate damage modelling. This latter aspect is particularly impressive – the best we’ve seen – showing realistic crashes, and how types of damage consequently affect car handling.

There’s no doubt that Codemasters has produced the most attractive racing game yet: there’s a fine level of detail in every scene, car, and livery. Unfortunately, Codemasters saw it fit to include ‘next-gen’ visual effects at every point, whether it was actually realistic or not.This means that every object gives off a slight ‘bloom’ or ‘halo’ effect, giving the impression that the world is like a softly glowing big budget movie, rather than the gritty, reckless and chaotic world of off-road racing.

DIRT really is the Colin McRae game for 2007, taking the simple, arcade elements of the TOCA/V8 Supercars series, and putting them into an off-road setting. For some, however, that isn’t a positive thing. Like TOCA, DIRT is still a ‘lighter’ sim compared to the latest batch of racing sims out there (like GTR 2 and rFactor), and the somewhat brutal requirement of ‘unlocking’ new content by winning points can be infuriating if you just want to pick a car and race it.

There are ultimately better rally sims out there (Richard Burns Rally still reigns supreme), and ironically the point-to-point rally event is actually the weakest event. But it’s hard to fault DIRT’s staggering amount of content, polish and variety. If you like the Codemasters style of racing games, get it now.