There’s nothing makes me reach for the blog faster than the feeling I’ve been ripped off and this is certainly the case with the video game Dirt2 on the Wii.

I’m a long term fan of motor sport video games ever since I owned Gran Tourismo on the PS2. I rue the day I gave that to my daughter in favour of a Wii. So I was delighted to see the announcement of Dirt2 available on the Wii platform. However I was hugely disappointed when I fired up my console and started the game.

Right from the opening sequence the game displays the poor quality graphics that are present throughout, though thankfully not quite as bad as the opening sequence. The game is divided into the usual arcade mode and championship mode in which you can unlock new vehicles and ‘body kits’, the latter being little more than alternative skins for the cars. There are very few cars available even once you’ve unlocked them and no upgrade or maintenance facilities.

The racing itself is reasonable; but here again the poor quality graphics really show the game up. Surrounding textures, trees for example, are little more than green blobby things and there’s little in the way of distant textures. The vehicles don’t show any highlights and even though we’re racing on dirt there’s no clouds of dust to obscure the view. The driving experience is OK; but there’s very little available in the way of drift. Touch the brakes to try and fish tail the back end in a corner and your more likely just to come to a stop than slide round the bend. The AI cars frequently don’t put up much of a fight and will often brake hard on a straight stretch for no apparent reason. They’ll usually do this at the same point on each lap so you can predict where it’ll be easy to pass them. Altogether unsatisfying.

You can play the game using a variety of different controller combinations and I started using the Wii remote and nunchuck, which was OK. However I then switched to the Wii steering wheel. Turning the wheel is supposed to steer the car, only it doesn’t! The car is almost completely unresponsive to the steering wheel necessitating a switch back to the nunchuck for steering.

Once you’ve won a race you can sit back and watch a replay of your triumph. Or can you?

For a start pressing A on the remote to continue after a race is often misinterpreted as a double press which takes you right past the replay menu and out to the race menu again. At this point you’ve lost the ability to watch the replay. If you do get to watch a replay the results are very poor:

• The replay is often jerky so you twitch round corners rather than gliding round them
• Again there’s no improvement in the overall video quality, no highlights or clouds of dust
• Your vehicle will have a shadow; but the AI vehicles often have no shadow at all which looks weird and is just sloppy programming
• If your car leaves the track and flies though the air it carries its under body shadow with it which makes it look like it’s flying on a big sheet of something. Poor!

The final nail in the games coffin for me is that most of the replays terminate before the race is over so you never get to see yourself cross the winning line. How naff is that? I’m not sure; but it might be dependent on the particular track. On at least one replay I watched it ended half way round the last lap. !?!

I think the only saving grace for this game is the sound track which contains some pretty catchy rock tunes without too much grunge. So while you’re waiting for your race replay to end prematurely you can at least listen to a nice ditty. This earned the game its second star.

Finally I have to say that as a racing experience Dirt2 way, way better than Mario Cart Wii and for that reason I’ll continue to play it; but come on Codemasters, you can do better than this.