Dirt 2 reaches the top spot in this rundown, is that a shock? Not to me because of how perfectly perfect it was. It used the first Dirt game and really ran with it. Dirt 2 wonderfully and beautifully had weight to each car, but still felt arcadey enough for it not to be taken too seriously. The career mode had players travelling around in an RV, acting as a headquarters, racing around the world in different race types and ending up at the X-Games, it had an incredible festival feel, and a rare trait in a racing game – a complete ending.
The multiplayer set the bar for the Dirt games and is still yet to be matched, allowing players to either chill in jam sessions, or jump into ranked games, memories of the team racing mode come to mind where I was leading and moaning at other people for not keeping up – ah, the memories.
The game includes a whole list of different celebrity friends, such as Ken Block, Tanner Foust, Dave Mirra, and included a touching feature to Colin McRae, as this was the last game to feature his name in the game title. Graphically it was a joy too, as it was in the early days of the Xbox 360, but did an incredible job of setting the scene with no performance drops.
