E3 2002: Colin McRae Rally 3 Hands-On

IGN gets dirty with Codemasters' next-gen rally racer.

While rally racing isn't quite the sport over here that it is in Europe, it's garnered some damn good games that make their way over here nonetheless. First and foremost of these is the venerable Colin McRae series from Codemasters. Its superlative physics and amazingly accurate rally driving model have made it the top of its game. Now with Colin McRae 3, Codemasters is coming back with all of that intact, improved, and looking fresh as fresh can be.

One thing, if anything, which has lagged a little behind some of the competition in the market, has been some of the car models and terrain. But after getting a really good look at the game today on the show floor, I can firmly say that they've solved that problem. The cars in Colin McRae 3 are beautiful. Plain and simple. The cars are insanely detailed inside and out. While its hard to demonstrate in numbers like this, cars used to have somewhere around 2,000 polygons per car, now they're upwards of 14,000 polys per car. This means smooth and sleek looking cars that are so realistic it's near scary.

The textures on the outside of the cars are also done extremely well. Not only are they crisp and clear, they have that nice shiny newly washed feel that reflects everything around. But as you know, rally racing is dirty business. You'll dirty it up in no time by doing donuts in the dirt and mud. This will create that nice scummy newly dirtied feel that doesn't reflect anything around it. Dirst is layered on in several layers for that slow pile up. One of the newer things I've seen in regards to the dust factor is that if you happen to "accidentally" fall into some water with your car, the dirt will wash off of whatever part of the car touched it.

But as the saying goes, you can't always judge a book by its cover. Codemasters took this to heart and made sure that everything under the hood is just as good as that outside of it. The entire car is modeled with incredible detail. The car is built in layers as well. You have that pretty frame on the outside, but then you also have the supporting roll cage on the inside, plus all of the working parts of the car. This means if you mess your car up enough you'll be able to see the brakes, struts, axels, drive train, etc. If you manage to knock the doors off your car, you'll be able to see more of the roll cage as well as the driver and navigator. The driver's leg moves up and down in conjunction with your use of the gas and brake. The driver's head also turns and the navigator will switch between looking at his map and at the road.

The damage model on the cars is pretty damn good. I had some great fun smashing into trees and whatever else along the road just to see what would happen. Every little piece that the car is built with, which means every little piece that a normal car is built with, can take damage. So the back bumper, if hit in the right way, will hang off of one side and bounce along with the movements of the car. Paneling will fall off, tires will become loose and wobbly, paint jobs will get scratched, and doors and trunks will pop open and flap around.

All of this fun crashing comes at a price as I soon found out. Cars will get noticeably harder to control. And rally cars racing across loose gravel and mud are already pretty tough to control without the help from the damage. All that said, Colin McRae 3 controls and feels nicer than ever. You know the physics model was already good in the first two games, but you just can never get real enough in a game I suppose. So things have been tweaked again to take it that one next step.

One thing that I hadn't seen in the game yet was the new pit interface. It's pretty spiffy for a few reasons. The pit crew is there working on your nice and shiny car with full animations. But when you decide to make some changes, you can go into this really cool X-ray mode that shows all of the inner workings of the vehicle. The parts you pick to mess with will highlight in red for you so you can bet a better clue of what you're actually doing. For people like me that have no idea which parts go where, it's a great feature.

Colin McRae is due out later this year for the PC, Xbox and PS2 with only a couple of noticeable differences. The most obvious being the difference in graphics capabilities and resolution. The other less obvious, altough still kind of obvious one being the multiplayer capabilities. Xbox will have four player split screen, PS2 will have two player split screen, and PC will have online play over LAN and the Internet for up to four players.

Look for more info and impressions on this one once we get t a chance to play with a more complete version of the game.

IGN Logo