When you insert Dirt into your Xbox 360 you will be greeted by potentially one of the greatest menu interfaces of all time. Beautifully slick and smooth, it is clear that a huge amount of effort and time went into crafting a menu system that would be intuitive, easy to use and beautiful. The entire menu is built in a sort of 3D style which just yells "ahead of its time". It is as though we have been given a preview into what gaming will be like in the near future and, it feels great. The loading screens sport the same style, and in a very flashy fashion present you with many statistics from your racing career (number of rolls, jump height, wins, distance driven, time driven and much, much more), and this is a nice approach to making loading times less noticeable.

On top of this you have the voice of your co-driver Travis Pastrana in your ear as he tells you what you can do, helps you tune your vehicles and also commends you on a good race. The help tuning is great for people new to tuning vehicles with no clue as to what does what, however the game is built up so that you can easily compete without any tuning at all, which won't appeal to all hardcore fans of the series.

These co-driver 'comments' are immersive, but also at times quite annoying. Some of the in-race comments like "me likey" are just plain stupid. Perhaps they should have limited Travis to calling out the corner numbers and any upcoming obstacles, as he does this fabulously.

The guts of Dirt is in the career mode which is built up much like Codemasters' other racing series, V8 Supercars. This has events built up as different tiers of a pyramid. From the outset you can choose from a number of events in tier one, however you need to complete this to earn money and gain points with which to unlock and work your way up the pyramid.

Money is also used to unlock the 46 cars available, and new car liveries. This is where the difficulty level helps as the higher the difficulty, the more you earn. Dirt has stepped away from traditional rally racing titles in that it has included a host of other events. Throw in the usual manual gears and five difficulty settings and there is a fair amount of difficulty scaling available to you. As the difficulty levels increase, so does mechanical damage and the opposition skill.

Six events are included in Dirt. Traditional point-to-point rally racing, crossover, rallycross, rally raid, CORR (Championship Off-Road Racing), and hill climb. They each present very different challenges and make the game more diverse than previous editions. Some of these will have you competing with several other vehicles on the track, bumping and bashing each other to get to the front of the pack. These new events call for very different vehicles, and you now have buggies and trucks of varying classes thrown into the mix with the usual run of the mill rally cars.

The handling of these buggies and trucks feels reasonable. However what was lost from the previous editions is the weighted feeling of the cars. In Dirt the cars fly over the track and are very over-responsive. It's a change, and you adapt to it, however it definitely is a more arcadey feeling to what previous iterations had. The cars also accelerate and brake very well, which makes them easier to stop and avoid crashing, but does take away some more from the realism.

On top of the career mode you have rally championships and time trials as well as the ability to jump into single events, which are split up into the different car classes and different regions. There are circuits from all around the world giving you a diverse set of courses. The UK, Australia, Germany and Japan are just a few of the countries you can race in and each has a unique feel.

Australia is the dusty orange / red environment you'd expect, with long fast straights and narrow tree lined sections. Japan is primarily damp tarmac, and Britain damp gravel through forests. The tracks just look incredible, with a fantastic draw distance and no pop-up to speak of. Luscious grass lines many of the tracks and sways beautifully in the breeze. Bushes and shrubs can be run over and flattened under the chassis, scratching, scuffing and damaging your car.

Almost everything lining the track is accurately modelled; this means when you hit the tyre barrier tyres will go flying in every direction. Similarly, the armco barrier can be dented and bashed, and there are no invisible walls to keep you on track. All of this looks amazing and it is surprising with the level of detail how little slow-down there is.

The game runs at a good solid frame-rate consistently, and only occasionally when you have a full pack ahead of you will you notice it struggle. But through all these dirty stages, where have the snow and ice stages of past editions of Colin McRae gone? In their shift to the new graphics and physics engine many features seemingly have been lost. Another is any sort of weather effects. So although a track will be wet, it won't rain during your stint.

The cars and damage models look absolutely amazing. Codemasters have put so much effort and detail into them it is mind-boggling. Each car has an individualised and beautifully recreated cock-pit view from where you can see the cracked windscreens which just look spectacular. The cars have nine damageable parts (engine, exhaust, driveshaft, suspension, etc.) which will all affect the performance of the car, making it pull to the left or right, or will actually put you out of the race completely such as if you lose a wheel.

The visible damage will see you virtually wrapping your car around trees, losing doors, hoods, windows -every part of the car is damageable and reacts with stunning realism. This is one of the most amazing damage models in any racing game to date and it will be interesting to see how the engine behind this develops in future Codemasters titles. Unfortunately as fantastic as the cars look, the engine sounds are awful and sound more like a whine than any sort of engine, and this is unfortunate as it would be great to really have the trucks growl and hear the powerful engines you have under your control.

Replays of each race will allow you to watch that terminal damage that you inflicted on your car, however these disappoint in that the vehicles often look like they are floating on the road and there is not enough dust or spark for them to be very spectacular. Also be warned: replays will only work if you have a hard-drive which seems strange, as this was not a problem on much older consoles.

The multiplayer also lacks any real bite. You can race against up to 100 opponents online in real-time, but only on rally and hill-climb tracks and only against the times of the other drivers. Arguably, though, this is much like real rally racing where drivers also rarely come upon another vehicle. But in this generation of gaming it would have been nice to have some bumper to bumper racing in the buggies to add some longevity to the game as the career itself is not huge in length.

All in all Colin McRae: Dirt is an enjoyable rally title. It lacks in several areas where we have come to expect content, i.e., online, however it does do a tollerable job of making up for this by having implemented fantastic physics on the tracks and objects, and created a ground-breaking damage model from scratch, with good if arcadey handling. The game could be longer but as with any racing game if you enjoy it you will keep coming back to improve your times. I would recommend this title to anyone who feels the need for a rally title to fill the gap that moving to the next-gen has left in some genres.

Editor's note:

Colin McRae passed away suddenly and tragically at the weekend, while piloting a helicopter in Scotland. His five-year old son, Johnny, and two family friends, Graeme Duncan and six-year-old Ben Porcelli, were also killed in the crash.