The tortoise beat the hare because he kept moving. In any race, you gotta move it or lose it.
Dirt Moto Racing builds momentum with a snappy presentation, great racing, and fine-tuned controls, but just as this fun off-road racer prepares for the home stretch - stop! The glaring omission of multiplayer, both online and local, prevents
Dirt Moto Racing from reaching the finish line unscathed.
The game gets moving quickly with great accelerometer-enabled controls. Tilting your handset steers a customisable ATV, while buttons for acceleration and braking can be tapped on the screen. It all works smashingly thanks to superior implementation and the availability of calibration and sensitivity options that enable you to tweak the controls to your liking.
Career mode packs a whopping eight racing tours, each comprising four events. You unlock each progressively harder tour by earning Bronze, Silver, and Gold medals, though you're free to choose the order in which you tackle the events within each tour.
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There's a mix of lap races, sprints, elimination events, and checkpoint runs. The checkpoint dashes are particularly fun, if only because you're free to zip about wide open spaces driving through waypoints instead of being hassled by tight turns in elimination and lap races.
Of the four locales featured - British Columbia, Death Valley, Toronto, and the Florida Keys - a number of variations are presented that test the limits of your steering skills. An abundance of sharp turns in the advanced race and elimination courses requires nimble driving in order to skirt past barriers and blocks lining the tracks.
The game frequently resets your rider to the centre of the course for the slightest departure, though it's better that you're instantly corrected instead of allowed to waste time veering from the race.
All of the Career mode events can be played individually in Single Event mode, as well as an additional Freestyle point run. Here the goal lies in racking up points by pulling off tricks within a short time limit. It's a blast thanks to an intuitive trick system that has you touching icons on the screen whenever you catch some air. Additionally, limited gestures drawn on the screen produce advanced manoeuvres.
Race times and Freestyle scores can be posted online, further boosting the value of starting up your engine a third, fourth time. Leaderboards, however, are the extent to which
Dirt Moto Racing revs things up online.
Network multiplayer is lacking. In fact, there's no local wireless or Bluetooth multiplayer either. For a racing game of this calibre to omit any form of real-time multiplayer is an enormous oversight. Downloadable ghost data does ensure that the experience doesn't grind to a complete halt, at least.
The action should be shifting into high gear precisely when
Dirt Moto Racing starts slowing down. Without multiplayer to keep things moving beyond Career mode and racing ghost data, this wonderfully fun racer comes up a hair short of its potential.
