Granted, DiRT is one of the best looking racing titles for the 360 to date, with incredible looking tracks and car models and even better looking damage models that show every scratch, every dent and every dented scratch with sick realism. The tracks themselves look great and then greater still when they're all carved up from where you went screaming off track.

However, all this goodness and greatness is only greatly good if you’re the only one on any given track. And this is fine if you're a rally purist and understand that the essence of rally racing is just a-boy-and-his-car -- or, more accurately, a-boy-and-his-buddy-and-his-car -- and more about best times than best crash-bang-smash-'em-upper.

The game controls themselves aren’t too bad. However, it must me said, when going around corners and chicanes and such, the cars seem to lack weight; floating rather than turning and looking completely unnatural. Sure, rally racing is suppose to be all about drifting, and you might otherwise forgive it for favoring the "accessible" arcade feel... but it doesn't come off as veraciously drifting in a simulation nor as a loosey goosey arcade racer. You adjust; you get used to it, but you're never fully "immersed" in DiRT because of it.

Still, DiRT's career mode covers a lot of rally, with 6 different types of rally races: the purist's Rally, of course, but also Crossover, Rallycross, Rally Raid, CORR (Championship Off-Road Racing) and Hill Climb. All lot to keep you busy, but not necessarily all of it good or great.

See, though there are such real life rally variants (impure rally?) where multiple cars race simultaneously, such modes included in DiRT are, ultimately, the game's undoing. To wit: in multi-car races in DiRT, single-player or otherwise, the frame rate drops so severely that it goes from one of the best looking games to one of the worse looking games in an instant. Just a chugging mess.

Then it gets worse: Multiplayer mode online is where the game truly stinks. Surely, the essence of solo boy/buddy/car Vs. other solo boys/buddies/cars is there, comparing best times at the end of it all (you do you not necessarily race with everyone on the same screen; you go solo then compare times) but you cannot actually pick which race track or which car you would like to use, so if you have a penchant for one class or one track, too bad. You sit in a lobby, the player slots fill up and then players vote -- vote! -- on the random tracks and random cars to be used, like some completely non-rally-like, bi-partisan pick-up game. There is lame, and then there is DiRT online. The shining strength of DiRT is its effective emulation of the lone rally racer, a real draw for rally purist, but online it's just a come-one, come-all clustermuck.

Sure, it's online stuff can be vaguely "accessible" and "community based" and all that online jargon; there are a couple of online modes that have you racing with other "live" racers simultaneously. And sure, that would make the free-for-all-ism make more sense in the just-for-fun sort of way, but there's that brutal frame rate chug mucking that right up, too, so that multiplayer online is a total wash (or muck bath, as it were) no matter what online mode you're in nor how "accessible" you like your online gaming.

Kudos to DiRT for bringing 6 different types of rally racing to the Xbox 360 and a huge cheer for making the game look so good -- when there is only one car on the track --, but DiRT lacks identity; it borderline fails as a purist's rally sim and totally tanks as a come-one, come-all smash-bang racing game, online and off.

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