Another SLRE review... after ~800h in Dirt Rally

[Lord_Verminaard]

(x-posted on RaceDepartment)

Allow me to start off with a small disclaimer by saying that I am 39 years old with a Wife, toddler, mortgage, full time job, etc.. and my gaming time is very limited. I also have limited space and therefore no wheel. I play with keyboard and mouse steering, which sounds a little strange but it works for me when I don't have a dedicated space to set up a wheel and I simply cannot get used to a gamepad on sim racing.

It took me no less than 5 hours of futzing around on getting my mouse steer setup to work with SLRE. My Dirt Rally setup consists of Vjoy for a virtual joystick, FreePie with a script I wrote to use mouse movement with an X-axis and also to apply a center-steer reduction like LFS does automatically. This wouldn't work at all with SLRE, and eventually I had to use X360CE to parse my Vjoy inputs into it to emulate a X360 controller and then spoof that as a Wheel input instead of a gamepad so it wouldn't apply gamepad filtering to the input. Pain in the ass yes, but it works flawlessly now and I can even use much of the same FreePie script I used in Dirt Rally and it feels very similar in both games. To be fair, I had to screw around with Dirt Rally as well and eventually override the device type so it recognized the Vjoy inputs as a wheel instead of a gamepad.

I played RBR when it first came out many years ago (and on a Logitech Wingman Formula GP at that!), also played Rfactor, GTR2, GTLegends, Live for Speed as well, have many hours in all of those titles. So basically what I am saying is, I'm not new at racing sims. I am also not a crazy time attack fiend and that is why you never see my name at the top of the leaderboards, but I managed some top 20 hotlap times in LFS and managed to have a few top 100 times in Dirt Rally on occasion.

SLRE hits on a lot of spots that I feel Dirt Rally fell pretty short. I was also reminded several times of RBR while playing, but I was also amazingly frustrated at some things that seemed simple enough that someone should have caught it during quality control.

Lets start with a summary and I will break it down later:
-Very good car selection but missing some key players.
-Many cars are very well represented, some others feel rushed and the driving experience doesn't quite seem right.
-Overall graphics are quite good. Good enough in some places, not good enough in others. I feel like all of the car models are very good and the minimal eyecandy effects are fine with me.
-Game plays well on my box: older i7 with R9380. All settings maxed with vsync @60. No stutter and very minimal frame dip.
-Stages are magnificent in design with lots of variety and stage length. Even the ones that seem rushed are still very good quality and seem realistic from a driving perspective, similar to RBR. Dirt rally falls short here as many of the stages in Dirt feel very "arcade-y" even if they are also based on real stages. Graphic quality aside, watching a replay in-car in SLRE looks very close to real WRC in-car footage.
-Rallyx stuff is a bore. I don't fancy Rallyx IRL either but it is annoying working your way through the challenges and being forced to do Rallyx to complete goals.
-Driving physics are simply amazing. There are quirks, like any sim, but it feels really darn good to me. Better than RBR and Dirt Rally in many areas.
-Sounds are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ horrible. Some of the engine sounds are almost ok on rear camera views, but that is about it. There is very little audible feedback in-car, which I rely on a lot since I don't have force feedback. It does sound like each wheel has it's own audio which is pretty great, but the tire-to-surface sounds are bad and too quiet and limited in depth that it isn't useful. Strangely enough most of the backfire and antilag sounds are pretty good which sounds really out of place with the rest of the audio.
-Pacenotes need a lot of work. Most of my mistakes are due to bad pacenotes. Adjusting call-out times to as far advanced as possible still isn't far out enough as there have been many times I have gone sailing over a hairpin before the co-driver even finished saying "caution, hair....."
-Damage model looks good, (except for the windshield) but is badly executed. The windshield will crack when you slide a rear tire into a bush.
-Car setups are kinda worthless it seems. I have driven a few cars back-to back with drastically different suspension settings and it doesn't make much of a difference. I am still not sure how the sliders for camber and toe affect anything, as graphically the camber is not represented so I have no idea what the settings mean. (moving it toward the + sign- positive camber, or MORE negative camber???) Braking settings are good though, and I am really impressed with how much of a difference the differential settings make, as well as reacting realistically which they are not in Dirt rally.

Allow me to hit upon some of those areas mentioned above in a little more detail.
Lets start with the graphics since everyone always tears SLRE a new one when comparing to Dirt Rally. Yes, the graphics are not as advanced. I am in the camp where in a driving sim, the graphics only really need to be "good enough" in many areas as graphic detail doesn't mean crap when objects are whizzing by in your window. Most of the time in SLRE this is good enough. Other places it is bad enough that it is a little bit of a turn-off. The road textures for example, some of them are great, (Monte Carlo) others are bland (Australia) and others look good at first but then you realize it is a copy/paste of a very small texture over and over. (Wales) The reflections look good to me, most of the lighting is pretty good too, but I really hate how most of the cars run with headlights on but on stages that are dark (but not night time) the headlights don't actually illuminate anything. Also the windshield effects are terrible. (re: damage modeling) The spectators look ridiculous, I think they were better in RBR. During replays, sometimes your car tires hover a little over the road surface even though you can see the suspension working which looks odd. I do feel that Dirt Rally is over-the-top in many graphic areas, especially all the blending and shading. Some of the other details though are nice, like bugs flying around and particles. The particle effects in SLRE are laughable, Wales looks pretty good but it looks like something an intern whipped up during a lunch break. I sort of wish the graphics were somewhere between Dirt and SLRE in quality.

The Stages, like I mentioned above, are one of the best parts of SLRE. They feel like the real places they are based off of, and if you can sort of look past the graphics it seems very much like real in-car footage from a Rally. I like how there is a little "run off room" in some stages like Wales and Finland, unlike Dirt where tipping one tire over the edge of the road in Wales will send your car flying into the trees. Also Dirt seems to purposely place objects on areas where you are more likely to run off the road and SLRE doesn't seem to do that.

The sounds- OMG I really hope the modders step up and fix this. I bet this game would sell twice as many copies if it sounded as good as Dirt Rally. Like I mentioned, I don't have force feedback so I need audio cues to help me out and SLRE doesn't provide much. Some choices for audio in this game don't make any sense at all- landing from a big jump? No sound. Careening sideways into a guardrail? No sound. Hitting a small temporary fence pole? Tremendous bang like someone kicked a metal rubbish bin. Seriously, WTF Milestone?

Related to sounds, the pacenotes. I originally chose American as nationality, (cause, well, I am!) but I had to switch it to UK 10 seconds into the first stage because the American co-driver sounded like Toby Keith. Some of the stages the pacenotes are mostly ok, other stages, they are WAY the **** OFF. Most frequently, "2" turns that are more like hairpins. Also very often a turn will "tighten" but no number is given to determine the tighten radius, so a "Right 5, tightens" could be Right 5, to hairpin or it could be Right 5 to 3. Some areas they tell you, but there is no rhyme or reason. Also as mentioned, setting the pacenotes to as far advanced as it will let me is not enough when using some of the faster cars. Many "keep right, or keep left" are also missing, also areas where "right 6 plus" is used shouldn't need a note at all. Also I have yet to hear "line" used, where instead the co-driver spends a lot of time saying "Left 6 plus, into right 6 plus, into left 6 plus, into right 6 plus" meanwhile I blast straight through the last turn before he finishes. Hoping modders will tackle this giant task or at least Milestone can work on improving them a little.

Lets get to the part everyone wants to talk about: Physics! I have some gripes, but I certainly would praise the physics of SLRE above everything else. The mud and gravel in Wales feels just SO RIGHT. Where in Dirt rally, a stage is supposed to be a mix of heavy gravel and medium gravel, I cant tell the difference. In SLRE, I sure as hell can tell the difference. This is also very obvious in Monte Carlo, where there can be three different surfaces you are driving on in one stage- ice, slushy snow, and wet tarmac. These areas are also well represented graphically, unlike Dirt rally which basically has randomly placed slick sections. (other than the obvious snow covered parts) I also especially like the harshness of landing from jumps, where in Dirt Rally the cars sort of float and fly like an airplane and then gracefully squish back to the ground- in SLRE the cars fall like a brick and whack the ground hard, very much like they do in real rally footage. (a place where missing audio really shows!) Also bottoming out the suspension is very obvious and reacts accordingly, and most of all, the cars jounce around even on tarmac which is very realistic, even in Dirt Rally where graphically you see the bumps in the road, the cars just float right over them and while there is a constant camera shake effect going on, the car still feels like it is floating on a cushion of air. SLRE makes it seem like you really are driving a stiff-suspensioned car over real surfaces, and instead of invoking camera shake the car actually dips and bobs through the sections like a real car. Weight transfer is spot on, sudden traction loss and gain again when going over crests is WAY different than Dirt Rally.

I could go on about other things, like the lack of being able to switch on or off the wipers and headlights, or how there is no shakedown option at all, (seriously, WTF???) quirky car setup, pointless RallyX mode, having to toggle the HUD off and on every single time to get it to show up, etc... but I am really enjoying this game. I got it on a Steam sale for $15 with all DLC and I feel like it is a steal.

That being said, I really really really hope that Milestone will continue to support SLRE, (although going by their track record, that is unlikely) or that the modding community will step up and try to correct some of the major downfalls that this title has. Just correcting the sound would be huge. This title really has a lot to offer and I hope more people try it out and give it a fair shot.

Thanks for reading.

[bobbie424242]

Great review! Great to see a few new players picking SLRE and enjoying it today.
The game more than deserve it.
Try to play with a (supported) wheel at some point if you can, it will blow your mind.
I suggest posting your review to reddit on /r/simrally as well.

[Lord_Verminaard]

Originally posted by bitowankenhobitt:

Great review! Great to see a few new players picking SLRE and enjoying it today.
The game more than deserve it.
Try to play with a (supported) wheel at some point if you can, it will blow your mind.
I suggest posting your review to reddit on /r/simrally as well.

Thanks! Yeah, a wheel is in my future eventually, but probably not any time in the next year or so.

I forgot about /r/simrally, thanks for reminding me! The more people get interested in this game the better chance there is for mod support.

[Kiel]

I got the game a while back and never installed it. Played a lot of RBR back in the days, and now growing bored of DR after 200 hours. Your review made me decide to install the game and give it a shot. Good review man, I liked it a lot.

[Cwot]

Great review man. I just tried the demo but the sound and the dated graphics kinda ruined it for me. I would probably buy it if it wasn't for that. It's nice to see a game that offers a demo though. More developers need to do this, so I'll give Milestone credit for that.

[RandomForceOne]

good reading mate! glad you like the game

[LokiD1978]

its good i bet with a pad, with a wheel a laggy mess of a game. ! You turn 50 yards in front of a corner to get in the apex.