It's seriously tough, and no doubt best played with a serious set up - I've played mostly on the Fanatec CSL Elite which spins like a ship wheel in a storm when things get more extreme, and commands a decent arm workout on most stages - though I'd still recommend it to less committed players on a pad. I also love the option to take an extra spare out with you, at a 20KG cost. Choice of tire compound before a stage is new, and the effects are noticeable. Still, there's something to be said for dragging home a damaged car, bits of it scraped alongside the scenery as it noisily grinds its way past the finishing line in one tatty, heroic lump. "If in doubt, flat out," ran Colin McRae's maxim, but here you're better off heeding Alain Prost's philosophy of winning at the slowest possible speed, minimising the risks lest you find yourself in a ditch towards the end of a draining 16km stage. There's an element of endurance to off-road driving that Dirt Rally plays wonderfully to, mistakes being punished with mechanical damage or quite simply the end of your run.
Given how much Dirt Rally 2.0 puts car and driver through, it's no wonder it can form such a strong bond between the two. I've fallen hard for pretty much every car I've driven in Dirt Rally 2.0. There are the brutish Group B cars that thunder along with the constant threat of violence, the impish and fun Fulvia and Mini or the turbocharged Sierra Cosworth RS500 that dares you to plant your right foot that little bit further. It all serves to bring out the character of each car - and what characters they are. The specifics of exactly what's changed this time out escape me - attention has been lavished in more than one area - but a new tyre model does seem to have had the biggest impact. VR support isn't in at launch, but is coming later this year - on Oculus and PC, at least. Visually this feels like a big leap over its predecessor - and Codies does a lovely line in moody HDR skies now.
The handling in this game, in short, is absolutely sublime. You can feel the weight shift back as you accelerate up a crest, then feel it pile back on again as the car squirrels under downhill braking, and it's all so tangible, so pliable. Take the forward wheel drive Lancia Fulvia around the rain-slicked tarmac of Spain's stages, say, and you can feel the 115 horses under the stubby bonnet slip their way through those front tyres as they spin beyond the edge of adhesion. Take any given car to any given stage and you'll soon understand what makes Dirt Rally 2.0 special. As ever, it's down to a simple matter of taste whether Dirt Rally 2.0 manages to dethrone that all-time great, but for my money there's now no finer off-road sim out there. It's been almost 14 years since Warthog Games' Richard Burns Rally, but it still remains peerless in its simulation of off-road driving, and while Dirt Rally came close its sequel comes closer still.
That 2.0 might evoke the much-loved sequel to Codemasters' Colin McRae Rally, but really it's a game bearing the name of another sadly departed British great that this commands comparisons to.