This release, not surprisingly, has much in common with WRC 2, just as WRC 2 had much in common with WRC 1. But it is much better than either of its predecessors! They've further upgraded the physics and the graphics, put in some new tracks, upgraded some older tracks. Many of the tracks are narrower and feel more perilous, with trees and rocks right up to the edge of the road. Great stuff! Car set-up defaults are also better than in the past, with more driveable cars right "out of the box", although the car setup page seems less easy to use now when you do want to tweak.

A major downside is that they dumbed down the career mode (Road To Glory) to be more DiRT-like, with sideshow events like gate-crasher, racing against aircraft (really!), and an infuriating drifting mode, plus silly "ability points" to acquire, and it lacks the backroom management stuff. You now get vehicle upgrades and sponsors as rewards for earning a certain number of stars (awarded for position and ability). However, the vehicle upgrades have to be manually applied to every car you have in your garage, and the upgrade screen makes it hard to see what upgrades need to be applied, so it all seems needlessly painful. And the sponsors are solely cosmetic now, instead of earning you bonuses. Frankly, I had to downgrade my score for all this nonsense.

One note on the ability points: these should be called "inability points". You get more points by running into things and goofing off than for running a clean stage. It is best to run the stage once for position, then run it again for "ability". Hit all the orange fencing ("destruction" points) and find an open spot then do donuts until you max out your points ("drifting").

Despite these issues, the actual rally stages still make it the best rally game on the PS3 to date. Many professional reviews are luke-warm for this one, just as they were for previous releases, but if you read those reviews by people who know and love driving games and rally in particular, it gets high marks for being a better rally sim than the DiRT series.

As a big fan of The Goodies since childhood, I have to say that it is a travesty that this is all that is released in North America. You can currently buy four two-disc DVD collections from Amazon UK (still only half the episodes they made), and I would recommend doing so over buying this one. The only episode here that is not on any of those releases is "Scatty Safari", and the transfer is poor quality anyway.

A movie tie-in game that is really not a full game at all. The main story is very short, you can easily do it in one sitting. There are only a few kinds of enemies, and each has a specific weapon or strategy to easily defeat it. Weapons and ammo are easily found (hint: if you find a new weapon, you will probably need it soon), so you just blast your way through the levels. It does have 2-play split-screen co-op, which makes some of the kills easier when you have to flank the enemy. Overall I'd skip it, unless you are really a Terminator fan.

Not being a comics fan, but definitely being a LEGO game fan, I found this fun but not as engrossing as games based on material I am familiar with. Seeing the LEGO take on scenes from movies I know is entertaining. Seeing it for random Batman stuff is less so. It still works as a LEGO game, though, with the usual array of simple puzzles, platforming, and characters with a range of abilities that you need to get all the goodies in each level. There are plenty of characters to collect from the spectrum of heroes and villains in the DC Comics universe, although few play a direct role in the story of the game, they just hang around Gotham waiting to be found.

Now for the bad: the story is bit short, I thought, and the Gotham City hub level is big, as they advertise, but - aside from a few key locations - everywhere is more or less the same as anywhere else, so it is sort of wasted. Many of the characters have aimed attacks, so the two-player game can get annoying, as any time the other player moves it throws your aim off (this has been a long-standing problem in LEGO games which they should have fixed by now!).

All in all a fun game, but to get the most out of it you need to be familiar with the DC Comics heroes and villains.

The biggest asset of this game: you can explore the entire map of Middle Earth. You can walk from end to end if you like, but you can also "teleport" to locations you have already unlocked. And it is all wonderfully realized. I found myself climbing to high places just so I could look at the view. There are plenty of side quests and minigames to keep you amused even outside the actual levels of the game. I spent lots of time just wandering around just to see everything.

The biggest problem with this game is that it is riddled with bugs that will annoy and, at times, infuriate. Characters get stuck in unrecoverable locations, or are unable to complete actions that are required to advance through the level. Sometimes it just hangs. Hopefully it can be patched, but until then get used to restarting!

[Edit: since writing this review a patch has been released which does address some of the major bugs. I love it, it is the best of the Lego games so far. The two things really still annoys me: jumping and switching characters. Jumping is so random that you will find yourself falling a lot during the platforming elements of the game. Since some of the tasks involve multiple jumps to scale a tall tower, you will generally find yourself re-starting from the bottom more times than patience can bear. Switching characters frequently just switches you to the helper character instead of pulling up the character selection dialogue. Since you need to switch characters to complete scaling tall towers, that usually means that your character just falls off and you have to start again. These two problems combined are most infuriating!]

This can be a fun game, with a good selection of cars and a great selection of real-life tracks, plus a few "made up" ones. The AI is aggressive but not totally ridiculous ... most of the time. Sometimes it gets a bit "physical" and sends you spinning out, which can be annoying, or you suddenly find yourself up against a car that is clearly in a different performance category, so all you can do is upgrade your car and hope for the best.

A serious problem with this game for the first-time user is that the default controller and car setups are truly awful, and make even driving in a straight line a challenge. This will quickly make you want to hurl your controller through the TV, but it can be fixed with some attention to both the advanced controller settings (under OPTIONS, especially steering sensitivity and deadzone, which are both too high) and the individual car tunings (under GARAGE, especially tire pressures, which are too high, and suspension, which is too soft; note also that you may need to buy upgrades to access some settings). So make sure you adjust those things before doing anything else (detailed suggestions for settings can be found with Google), and test your tunings until you get exactly what you want. Changing settings by even a small amount makes a real difference, and you can save tunings for each car on each track, so you can really dial things in for each race. Proper attention paid here will make the racing so much more fun.

Another tip is to make sure you don't use more car than you need to. The AI will match whatever car performance index (PI) you choose, so choosing faster cars will just make the competition harder. If you are in a Class A race, for example, remember that A starts at a PI of 1500, so pick/upgrade a car close to that PI, and you will find the racing much easier than if you choose a PI 2000+ supercar.

All that said, the really BIG problem with this game, the one that makes me give it a lower rating, is that there are numerous events in career mode where you have to drive a loaner car that you cannot upgrade or tune, so you are stuck with the awful defaults. You will have trouble driving most of these cars at competitive speeds, which makes those events a real chore - and sometimes nigh on impossible - virtually negating any enjoyment derived from the rest of the game. Driving the loaner McLaren at Nordschleife is an exercise in frustration that will make you want to cry. Better defaults or the ability to tune those cars would make all the difference. The only silver lining to that cloud is that if you can tame these beasts (which require exquisite mastery of steering, brakes, and throttle just to keep them on the track) it will make you a better driver in the long run.

Update: I ended up getting rid of this game. The frustrations of dealing with the loaner vehicles was just too much. What were they thinking?

This is basically the same game as the previous version, with more cars and some better tracks. You will find that 9 of the 13 countries (Sweden, Mexico, Portugal, Jordan, Finland, Germany, France, Spain, Wales) are the same, with only minor updates to the tracks. That said, the 4 new countries (31% of the total) Argentina, Italy, Australia, and Greece (instead of Japan, New Zealand, Bulgaria, Turkey in the 2010 game) are a cut above the rest, being much more technical and deserving of the rally title. They obviously put some effort in track design between the two versions being released. If all the tracks were updated to that standard it would be awesome, but even as they are it is still a great little rally game. DiRT my have the lead in graphics, but it has lost the rally spirit, which this game tries to maintain. Worth a look for rally fans.

I have mixed feelings about this one. The graphics are awesome, and they toned down the "dude" stuff from DiRT 2. The cars are many and varied, and drive very nicely. But the content is lacking. The rally stages are numerous, but short and repetitive (each country actually has just one course with an alternate route in the middle, and this is sliced and diced to make 8 overlapping stages). They are also not very technical, as they are reused for the high-speed trailblazer events (think hill climb without the hill). One thing unique to this game is the gymkhana events, which people seem to either love or hate. Note that aside from the tutorial and first gymkhana event, you can complete the career mode without ever doing any gymkhana. You also have rallycross, head-2-head (super special stages), truck and buggy races (but only one truck or buggy to choose from). It is not bad, overall, but if they could blend the tracks of DiRT 1 with the graphics and car models of DiRT 3 it would be great!

Yes, I said the best. I have all 3 DiRT games, and this is the one I enjoyed most. While it lacks the accessibility and polish of the later games, it is a grittier take on off-road racing, and has more and better content, especially for rally fans. Thrills like racing down a narrow, twisting dirt track in Australia with gum trees inches away and the shoulders littered with sticks (that you can hit!) are just unmatched by anything that has come after. The stages are a decent length too, unlike the "gone in 60 seconds" stages of the later games (which are not technical enough for raly anyway), and cars have detailed set-up options, with multi-stage events having service areas for damage repair. Other disciplines include crossover (think rally super special stages), rallycross, rally raid T1 (SUV) and T4 (truck), hill climb (including the monumental Pike's Peak course), CORR buggies and trucks, and a wide variety of vehicles in which to race (FWD, RWD, AWD, Group B, big rigs, you name it!). The 66 events of the career mode never feel like they are getting repetitive (I'm looking at you DiRT 2), and offer a good challenge with a range of difficulty levels. I'll finish with a tip for making money in career mode: you get the full prize money for completing an event at a higher level, but only a fraction of it if you redo it at the same or lower level, so start each event at the easiest level, then move up to the next level, and so on. You'll have more money than you can spend in no time!

If you look around you will find lots of lukewarm reviews of this game from the gaming community. Sure, if you want amazing graphics and lots of "awesome dude!" pop and sizzle and a variety of disciplines in your unpaved racing experience, the DiRT series is where you should be, but if you just want rally racing - and only rally racing - without all that hype then this is not a bad little game. It is more the spiritual successor to the older Colin McRae Rally series than DiRT is.

So what do you get? Thirteen countries each with six stages, or 78 total, although this includes reverse and overlapping sections. These stages are also at least double the length of the dismayingly short stages of DiRT 2/3. There is a selection of real-life cars and liveries from J-WRC, P-WRC, S-WRC, and WRC, although these are limited to cars from the 2010 season (there is a Group B DLC if you can get it *). All cars (aside from DLC) and stages are unlocked for free play from the start, so you don't have to slog through the career mode just to get that car you want to try out.

I'll admit that the graphics are not up to the high standard set by DiRT 2/3, but they are not as bad as some suggest. What really matters is the driving experience, and there it shines, with nice touches like the ability to vary the timing of the the pace notes (I find the default setting to be a little late), and a unique cockpit view that does not take up half the screen with the dashboard and more closely emulates what you actually would perceive when driving (the full dashboard view is also there if you want it). It also has a real damage system, with an info-graphic showing you which parts of your car you broke in that last hit! Car performance actually suffers when parts go flying, and you can disable your car entirely from a bad run-in with a rock. Needless to say, these aspects are all lacking the DiRT 2/3 games, where cars are like the Energizer bunny: they just keep going and going. Also, I have to mention brakes. You need to use them. If you are used to the DiRT, you will crash a lot until you learn that lesson.

I have mentioned the DiRT series a lot, because that is what this game is invariably compared too, but they are not really the same genre. DiRT encompasses multiple disciplines and goes for the high-octane, adrenaline-rush of wheel-to-wheel racing (good for on-line competition!), with some rally-style things thrown in as a nod to its heritage. WRC just wants to do rally. And there is nothing wrong with that. I will keep both, but when I want to rally, this is where I go.

Note that there is a WRC 2011 game too, which rehashes a lot of the content here and is supposed to be better in various ways (e.g., more varied cars, various improvements to graphics, sound, etc.). That said, 4 of the 13 countries (31%) - Japan, New Zealand, Bulgaria, Turkey - are unique to the 2010 version of the game, while the 2011 version has Argentina, Sardinia, Australia, Greece (both have Sweden, Mexico, Portugal, Jordan, Finland, Germany, France, Spain, Wales).

(* A note on availability: this game was not released for NTSC, but you can buy the PAL version and it will work! There was lots of talk about it not working on NTSC PS3s early on, but there is patch that fixes that issue, which gets installed the first time you insert the disc. The only caveat is that you cannot download the DLC from the North American Playstation Store.)

P.S. I add a note here about handling: a common complaint is that the cars handle badly. My response is YOU HAVE TO CHANGE THE SETUP. For whatever reason, the default setups are atrocious. The cars understeer like there is no tomorrow. I find that tweaking the brake balance, traction balance, and front/rear differential settings to give more oversteer will make the car perform much better under both acceleration and braking.