You might have seen this new racing game floating about on Steam, and I thought it looked good so I gave the demo a whirl.

Now normally I don't do racing games on the PC because I'm terrible with anything other than a gamepad (which I don't have). But I thought "Hey, this looks like fun, lets see what it plays like".

After the standard install, it presented me with some quite nice floaty 3D menus. Already I was impressed with the graphics, and I hadnt even started playing yet!

It has a choice of 3 races. One is a fairly standard race track setting, the second is an inner city street track conversion, and the last is a drift competition.

I plumped for the track, which gave me a BMW to play with. You can adjust the cars mechanics, but I wasnt too bothered so I let them be.
As usual with demos, you start at the back of the grid, with a quick intro swoop to your position. And so it begins. I'm revving my engine, sounds good, 3, 2, 1 and I'm off!!

The rest of the grid is just ahead and I start to catch up, looking for an opening on the inside. But I'm going a bit too fast...

Oh crap I've rear ended him!
Oh crap someone's rear ended me!
Oh crap I've rear ended him again!
Oh crap I've rear ended someone else!

Now imagine that, only in the space of a second.

So once again, I've proved I'm pants with the keyboard when it comes to racing games. I'm out of the race, sitting an obliterated hunk of German automobile engineering.
But it did provide an opportunity to watch my glorious cockup with the replay suite. Appearantly, you can go back to any point in a failure replay and restart from there. I didnt try however since I'd barely got off the line.

But after another failure to get round the first corner I did manage to finish. I was lapped thrice, and my car looked like Amy Winehouse after a night out, but I'd done it. The lighting was great, the smoke effects were pretty damn good, and the only slowdown I got was when I was eating dirt or burning my rubber like a catholic priest (which I admit was most of the time).
At the end of it all, with 3 more epic fails under my belt, I was left thinking, "I might just get a pad for this."

So I implore you, if you've reached the end of this novella, give this demo a go.

You'll like it!

Like it damn you!!!

On way way to hunt down your reccomendation as ever Spidey

its a great little game indeed, i will be getting my 360 copy back sometime this week

still say it plays better on the 360, even with a pad on pc just dont feel right to me

It's a wicked game, I bought a 360 pad just to be able to play it well And I'm not a big racing game fan at all.

Even on a pad I'm having problems, mainly braking, I keep locking up with lead foot of death then head first into wall at 180mph. :f So turning on the assists can be a great help especially if you have a less than ideal control method, I would use them all on for keyboard myself. Not for drift though you need them all off for that.

Yup the flashback system is really cool, best new feature of a racing game in a while imo, and gives people like me a chance to complete a whole race without major incident. My attention usually wonders after a bit, not good in a le mans @ 240mph.

Oh and if your a racing pro like K3D :f you can turn off all the assists, put the difficulty up to the max and get no flashbacks and even put on pro mode where you cannot even restart the race. You get uber reputation points for it if you can complete it, but bugger that I like slamming my way through the pack too much. :E

Is this the unoffical expansion / sequel to Dirt?

in anycase i love it havent taken it out the 360 since i got it.

Played the demo but had a real problem with the controls. The car was swerving all over the place so gave up and un-installed. A week or so later I discovered that the demo and full game had problems with many non Xbox360 controllers so I dug mine out and tried it again. Definately getting this now (via Steam) The only thing I didn't like was being kicked from MP games for no other reason than being way ahead of everyone else.