Colin McRae: DiRT 2 features a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to the most diverse and challenging real-world environments. This World Tour has players competing in aggressive multi-car and intense solo races at extraordinary new locations, from canyon racing and jungle trails to city stadium-based events.
Years around it's release were surely the golden era of the codemasters.
A great variety of cars and tracks, altrough some may miss Pikespeak or snow tracks, is still more than enough to enjoy the game. It have the best rallycross of the Dirt series, as the car handle well in both dirt and asphalt.
Speaking about handling, this is the main reason how I call it the codemasters golden era, just alike Racedriver GRID the balance arcade-simulation is at it's best here. You can't carnage around the tracks, and don't need to drive scared of the cars reactions, also it don't require you a G27 to don't be dusted in harder difficulties. Which were also a high point of the game, six difficult levels (Casual, Normal, Serious, Savage, Extreme and Hardcore) don't let huge time gaps, so you can tune it different in base of your affinity to each discipline.
The loved and hated Flashback option also makes things more interesting, as you can miss one time or two you can tune the difficult a little bit harder than usual, just flashback that little nasty corner instead the whole race makes a lot of difference when you meet the rocks around trailblzer routes or the unforgiving Malaysian trees, also the AI can be on your shoe all the time without the risk of restarting a 8lap Rallycross cause someone smashed your rear end you on the last lap.
Last but not least. The superstars on the game and the menus give a whole special feeling about the game in general even against the other DIRT's. The menus don't look like just menus, it try to show racing as a whole motor-minded world instead of the classical "select a ride. select a track. go." and people talking to you and between themselves at the track is something that I missed at dirt 3, Jayde Taylor laughing by past you and people complaining when you crash them can be surprisingly fun.