Recent reviews by Zuckerwatte o.O

The very definition of 'We've got AC4: Black Flag at home'. Buyers beware: Only for true jank enjoyers.

A charming little rally game that feels like it's from a bygone era. In terms of accessibility for gameplay, hardware requirements, and price (on sale) it's basically unmatched. Recommended for potato PCs and for those looking for a more arcade-style rally experience!

V-Rally 4 is the supposed resurrection of the V-Rally series, which has been on hiatus for 16 years. While it does successfully deliver a more diverse and accessible off-road racing experience than its strictly rally oriented WRC counterpart, it still has its shortcomings. Even so, being just a filler to make up for the 2 year gap between WRC 7 and 8, it may offer something to those reminiscing about the good ol’ DiRT titles when bought on sale.

- Very decent graphics due to the use of the same engine that’s powering WRC
- One of the finest rally stage designs in the genre
- Initial progression is satisfying
- Daily online challenges

- Average engine sounds
- Old-fashioned HUD
- Limited choice of vehicles aside from rally they had those licences from WRC anyway
- Very limited assortment of factory liveries
- Upgrades may make your car very hard to control and there’s no way to undue them
- Personally, Extreme-Khana should be more drift-friendly on tarmac

- Awful starter cars
- Dead multiplayer with ridiculously grindy achievements

The biggest gripes of VR4 are the structure of its V-Rally Mode and the broken difficulty scaling. Events are randomly generated for each racing week, including championchips and world championships. Since it’s the goal of the game to become world champion in each discipline, you are completely reliant upon the algorithm to grace you with the championship you want to compete in. Continously entering events of the same discipline will make you more likely to be able to enter a championship, but they shouldn’t have been randomly generated in the first place.

Then, at the beginning of each regular event the AI level can be scaled between 0% (easy) and 100% (hard). Championships cannot go lower than 50%. Firstly, there’s no indication whatsoever what those values actually mean. Secondly and more importantly, there’s also a dynamic difficulty scaler working in the background that scales the AI to your team level and the number of recent wins. Unfortunately, this means that steadily upgrading your team and winning too many events will make the AI unbeatable. Your only choice is cheesing the system by quitting a couple of events to lower the difficulty, which in turn may result in no challenge at all. There’s no middle ground in the long run, which really puts a damper on the fun.

Despite its flaws, V-Rally 4 should offer dozens of hours of entertainment for those looking to fill the hole the DiRT series has left. As long as you’re willing to circumvent its broken difficulty scaling, that is. Gravel does not include a rally mode, but otherwise it’s probably the more polished alternative. In the end it’s a good effort to establish a game that equals what DiRT is to DiRT Rally and I would not hesitate to give another entry a chance, although IMO they should have dropped the 4 in the title and gone with a tagline instead, since it’s so much more than just rally.

Day 82 since the multiplayer launched and just awful optimization for AMD Polaris GPUs, which is literally the most widely used* of its graphics cards series and which is the same architecture powering the Xbox One X. Absolutely mind-boggling considering the rather mediocore graphical fidelity.

*according to the Steam hardware survey

This isn't DiRT, it's DiRT Rally light and as such you will spend most of your time in rallies - some of which lasting from 30 minutes up to a single hour. Now, this wouldn't be a problem per se, but the dynamically generated rally stages are simply pre-made modules that are randomly put together, so eventually you will have seen all the bends and turns the system can throw at you. Neither rallycross nor the new landrush mode offer anything better in terms of variation - especially the latter being a shadow of it's former self in earlier titles.

Initially, progression is great: you start off with building up your own racing team, learning the handling and unlocking faster classes. Daily, weekly and monthly challenges will make you regularly come back to the game and all seems great. Until you realize that this system is flawed as well. Not only does it end up being an empty money pit, but also does it lack balancing: a full A or B-grade staffed team will eat up so much of your price money, that you will actually earn more by just renting a car, which makes the whole system completely pointless. And how is it that in landrush you will earn just as much as in rally, but in a fraction of the time?

Sure, DiRT has never looked, sounded or felt this good. The selection of cars is decent and collecting rare liveries is something I enjoyed more than I should have. Also, the in-depth tutorial offered in the DiRT Academy is appreciated. Joyride on the other hand is a precursor to playgrounds in DiRT 5, but it's lacking the ability to create your own courses and does not provide any rewards whatsoever, which made me skip it.

Overall the long and ultimately boring races burned me out and I stopped playing. I've seen everything the game has to offer and I certainly do not feel like driving the same rally stages for another 10 or 20 hours, because that's how long it would probably take me to finish everything. Do not expect any arcady offroad fun, which is what DiRT used to be about. While I got the game for cheap, I do wish I had used my time differently.

Basically, DiRT on a budget and that's just what I wished for. I regret nothing.