DiRT 3

DiRT 3 is the installment in which, after a detour into American off-road show racing, the series returned to what it started with: classic rally. The foundation is driving on narrow gravel, tarmac, and snow-covered stages against the clock, with a co-driver who recites the corner notes in your ears. You have to hear a long seventh to the left, picture it, and drive it before you ever see it, and it's precisely this need to trust the voice beside you that makes rally a unique discipline. Besides that, the game offers rallycross on closed circuits, hillclimbs, and battles on snow.

The driving model can be tuned from accessible arcade all the way to a very demanding mode without assists, where every weight transfer is palpable. A helpful crutch is a feature that lets you rewind a few seconds after a crash, so the game never punishes anyone with the loss of half an hour over a single mistake. A major new addition was Gymkhana, a discipline of stunt precision on a closed compound where drifts, gate passes, and spins around obstacles are chained together. It was created in collaboration with Ken Block and complements the otherwise seriously toned career well.

Technically the game was among the best in its genre on Xbox 360. The stages are beautifully lit, weather and night stages with headlight cones cutting through dust create real atmosphere, and vehicle damage is visible both on the bodywork and in how the car handles. The sound of engines and flying gravel is excellent, while the music stays deliberately understated and lets the co-driver stand out. Reviews were very favorable, and many players still consider the third DiRT the best-balanced entry in the whole series, because it hadn't yet lost its rally soul while already having modern controls. Today it plays wonderfully, and on a standard controller it feels friendlier than most later simulators. At the same time it shows well why rally as a genre has never been successfully replaced by anything else: nowhere else is a mistake punished so immediately, and concentration through a long stage so exhausting.