A heck of a lot seems to have changed for Colin McRae since I first sat down with one of his rally games back in the days of the original PlayStation. Skipping from first Subaru to Ford and on to Citroen, he was then booted from the World Rally Championship, only reappearing for a couple of Skoda outings and a one-off Citroen return in the past couple of seasons. Other than appearing in the Paris Dakar and giving the Le Mans 24 Hours a shot, one gets the impression that now is the autumn of Colin’s career, which makes the timing of Colin McRae: DiRT seem a little curious.

What comes as even more of a slight shock in the complete facelift that the series has undergone since Colin McRae 2005, with proceedings taking a distinct handbrake left towards Hollywood from the moment the spectacular intro sequence kicks in. What’s more, your initial moments in the game (and a heck of a lot more, come to think of it) are narrated upon not by womble-voiced McRae but American motocross and rally star Travis Pastrana, which is something you’ll either like or hate depending on your penchant for over-the-top American announcing. Still, making the menus feel like an interactive experience certainly adds a notch on presentation, and you certainly can’t say that Codemasters haven’t rolled out the red carpet to introduce you to the game.

Once you’re in and ready, a veritable mountain of gaming awaits you. Rally Championship mode presents itself as the standard championship mode, offering a choice of a European season, an International one or a combined effort in the form of the Global Championship. With rallies varying from the dirt and mud of Britain to Japan’s fearsome tarmac stages there is plenty of variety to keep you absorbed for a good while (especially when trying to keep the car from hitting all sorts of nasty things while whizzing though forests in Australia), and with a selection of different rally machinery from your standard Imprezas and Evo Lancers to the lesser-powered Clios and Corsas, mixing and matching provides plenty of unique challenges.

Other than a Rally World selection that offers you the chance to compete in single events unlocked elsewhere in the game, the focal points of DiRT are undoubtedly the Career Mode and the Xbox Live multiplayer. Selecting the former will see you presented with a hulking pyramid of racing events for you to whiz your way around, with progression gained via earning enough points in each tier to unlock the next level of events. It’s a whopper of a task, and one that packs in a lot more of that variety I kept on harping on about earlier.

In fact, it’s the career section that peels off DiRT’s shiny exterior and reveals a game that has changed focus vastly from Colin McRae games past. Whilst the classic point-to-point rally events remain with a selection of appropriate vehicles, but these now nestle alongside rally raid events in big trucks, rallycross races around circuits with mixed surfaces and CORR series buggy racing to name but a few. Being somewhat of an all-rounder is now a key feather in your cap, and adapting your driving style to suit whichever type of event you are undertaking will keep you on your toes throughout.

Now, car handling has always been a little bit of a thorny issue when it comes to rally games. Previous Colin McRae games have always felt a little floaty, mostly due to the way in which the car rotated around an invisible central pivot. Codemasters have been keen to tell us in the run up to DiRT being released that this is most definitely no longer the case now their new Neon engine has been employed to look after all things physics related. Despite their protestations it’s safe to say that this latest title is still not in the Richard Burns Rally league as far as handling goes, with car handling still feeling curiously feathery at times and lacking a certain sense of inertia.

Then again, perhaps we should remind ourselves of the audience that DiRT is aimed at. The gradual progress that typifies early sessions on Richard Burns Rally are all fine and well for those sitting at their desktop PC’s with their steering wheel and pedal sets, but the constant punishment of car meeting scenery would have been enormously frustrating for the majority of people with just a 360 pad, especially given the diversity of the vehicles and events on offer. Whilst the aforementioned rally sim focused itself purely on standard rally events, DiRT finds itself throwing you from one discipline to the other quicker than good ol’ Colin McRae himself used to throw his rally cars from lock to lock, something that would have made anything particularly exacting a complete pain to get used to.

That’s not to say that DiRT is easy by any stretch of the imagination. Career races offer the player five different levels of difficulty for each event, with the higher reaches offering more cash for your dash than easier levels will. Opponents at higher levels show a commendable turn of aggression when the situation suits, and although the AI isn’t exactly the most bright that you’ll come across it gets the job done and makes the racing rather tense affairs.

In addition to that, the game also showcases an extensive damage model which sees car parts being dented, shredded and discarded each time you get a little too close to the various hazards lining the ribbons of tarmac you race through. The higher the difficulty the more terminal your crash damage can become, and if you’re anything like Jay you’ll have to bump down the difficulty to get anywhere near the end of events for the first few hours of play for fear of spectacularly rolling your car into a bush.

So, that’s your single player side then. Progression through career opens up new cars to buy and new liveries to use, all of which can be then used in the Rally World section. Still, doing all this won’t take you forever and you will no doubt be heading online to see what fruits hang from DiRT’s Xbox Live tree. Now, given that the game showcases a whole range of different off-road disciplines across a good selection of courses and stages, it would be pretty safe to assume that there are plenty of modes with which to battle against your online chums, right?

Well guess what folks, you’d be wrong. What you actually end up with is a solitary game mode that allows you to take on other competitors in a 100-player rally stage on a selection of routes, with each player setting their times and having them updated on the other player’s screen in real-time. That’s not to say that doing so isn’t enjoyable – it most certainly is, yet you feel that some buggy racing and crossover stage battling would have gone down a treat too. The other function Live offers is to show you how well your offline efforts stack up compared to other players worldwide ala Project Gotham 3 and Forza 2, but you can’t help but feel that Codemasters have missed a trick by having such a lack of online modes.

Apart from this, the only other major quibble you could throw in DiRT’s spokes is the framerate during hectic races. Now, let me start here by saying that this latest instalment in the series is one of the finest looking games to hit the Xbox 360 to date. The vehicles themselves are detailed and shatter and deform in a painfully realistic manner, whilst the tracks and stages all take place amongst beautiful scenery. Rigged up to a decent sized HD TV and with a decent surround sound setup to take full advantage of the in-game Dolby it’s a fantastic sensory experience. All that being said, though, the game occasionally judders from the otherwise smooth 30fps that it usually churns out, and at times this will slightly affect your effort behind the wheel.

Hence, it’s with mixed feelings that I sum up Colin McRae: DiRT. Looking at it from a positive point of view it looks fantastic, packs in plenty of different forms of off-road racing and remains an enjoyable, variety-packed experience throughout. From the enthralling racing action right down to the little touches like the game letting you know various statistics such as average speed, number of crashes and your favourite car on the loading screens between events, Codemasters have lavished detail and care into their product and it has certainly paid off.

If we were to look from the other side of the mud-stained fence, though, you could level that the slightly woolly handling, the brash Americanised nature of some of the presentation, the lack of choice in online modes and the juddering framerate all serve to dampen the experience. I certainly get the feeling that there is plenty of merit in the way the series has been slanted, and the mixture of Colin McRae past with MotorStorm current throws up some thrilling action. If and when they can get the online side right and sort out the rather tricky framerate then it would be fair to say that the series will be back with a real bang. For now, though, it’s pleasing to see things headed in the right direction once more.

(In the months that have passed since this review, Colin McRae sadly passed away. He'll be very much missed).