I've been playing Dirt 3 on PC and Xbox 360 for the last couple of days and I have some mixed feelings about the game.

First the good.
The handling is great - a good blend of sim and arcade to make a playable and fun game. You'll believe you can drive a rally car, it's tricky without being overwhelming and just what you'd hope for in this sector of the market.

Graphics are very good on both formats I've tried. There's plenty of detail in the locations and cars and the action for the most part is very smooth. Replays look good, with the cars firmly planet on the road and the ability to upload short excerpts to YouTube is welcome.

...

The presentation is great - that whole X-Games nonsense from previous games has been ditched in favour of a more stylistic menu system. It's now easier and quicker to just get on the road rather than having to wander aimlessly around a caravan.

There are plenty of ways to get through the main career. So if you are a grown up and believe rally cars are for driving on rally stages, rather than spinning around while Americans hoot at you, then you can do that and ignore the gymkhana nonsense.

And now the bad.
While Lionhead's Peter Molyneux has a reputation for overselling his games, Codemasters is beginning to get a reputation for complete bullshit. Remember the return of Operation Flashpoint, all those cool making of movies and the heavy promotion? And what we did we get? A completely broken game that was given very little post-release support. Well all the talk of a focus on rally for Dirt 3 is similar bullshit.

There are only four rally locations in Dirt 3 (one less than Dirt 2) and each only has one or two main stages. The rest of the stages are elements of these larger ones. The developer has tried to cover up this by not including stage maps in the game and giving reverse stages different names. It's cheap and cynical and after the marketing of the game as having a rally focus it's a very poor show. And the stages themselves? Well they are pretty, but there's a real lack of variety in the game (it's barely a world tour is it?) and the rally stages are painfully short. Why - at the very least - couldn't the stages from Dirt 2 be included too?

And what of the trailblazer stages? These longer point to point stages have to be raced with overpowered "Pike's Peak" style cars. Couldn't we have a go on them with rally cars as they'd be ideal rally courses? No you can't. And what's with all the unskippable videos telling us things such as what rally is all about? Knowing what rally is a given really isn't it?

PC stability on DX11/x64 is just as poor as in Dirt 2 and F1 2010. It seems that DX11 support is a great marketing bullet point but there are still fundamental crash bugs in the engine that Codemasters has left along for the third game in a row. Many PC gamers are finding that Dirt 3 will often crash while loading a stage. Again, poor show - especially given this is the same problem that blighted the previous game.

Final thoughts
Taken on the whole Dirt 3 is a fun game but it could have been better. The fancy menus and flashy graphics have fooled the less-thorough press (Eurogamer, IGN etc) who continue to be very forgiving of Codemasters. There's plenty to enjoy in Dirt 3, especially some of the multiplayer games, but the truth is it's no more a rally game than Dirt 2 was. What has changed is the marketing focus, rather than the game contents.