DiRT Rally

You can take to the tarmac from the comfort of your own home thanks to the latest Humble Codemasters bundle.

Twelve games in total are lining up in the starting grid, ten of which will put you behind the wheel of various things that go vroom. Some of the bigger games featured include F1 2019, Dirt Rally 2.0 and Dirt 4 - all of which you can drive away with for just 12.

Of course, while Codemasters is known for its prowess on the track, they've also made a few games that don't feature cars. That other side is represented by both the minion manipulating antics of Overlord 2 and last-gen military sim Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. Those crop up in the first tier along with Grid Autosport and Toybox Turbos for just a quid.

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Middle-earth™: Shadow of War™

This month's Humble Choice bundle is now live, featuring the likes of Two Point Hospital, Shadow of War and Dirt Rally 2.0 as some of its biggest inclusions.

If you've not taken a trip over to Humble for a while now, this is the second iteration of the newly launched Humble Choice bundle. It had previously been known as Humble Monthly until a rework in December.

In this new version, instead of being thrown an assortment of mystery games each month, you now get to pick and choose a limited number from a wider selection depending on your subscription level. Basic members can choose three games for 11.99 a month, while Premium members can select nine games for 15.99 a month.

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Saints Row IV: Re-Elected

Microsoft has revealed the latest titles heading to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service for PC, and they look an awful lot like Dirt Rally 2.0, Saints Row 4, Cities: Skylines, and Bad North.

Cities: Skylines, of course, is developer Colossal Order's phenomenally popular city-builder, which, since its launch in 2015, has gone from strength to strength. Four years on, it's now received eight major expansions - After Dark, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, Mass Transit, Green Cities, Parklife, Industries, and Campus - plus an enormous number of free feature updates, and even a console release. Its enduring popularity is well-deserved too; it's a thoroughly entertaining urban planning and traffic management sim, and well worth checking out.

As for developer Volition's Saints Row 4: Re-Elected (which includes all DLC), it's a wonderfully idiotic spin on the open-world gangster genre, this time ramping up the ridiculousness to previously unseen heights. While early games in the series played it mostly straight, Saints Row 4 throws caution to the wind, delivering a game in which aliens trap our likeable rogue's gallery of heroes in a digital simulation of their beloved city of Steelport.

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Saints Row IV: Re-Elected

Microsoft has revealed the latest titles heading to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service for PC, and they look an awful lot like Dirt 2.0, Saints Row 4, Cities: Skylines, and Bad North.

Cities: Skylines, of course, is developer Colossal Order's phenomenally popular city-builder, which, since its launch in 2015, has gone from strength to strength. Four years on, it's now received eight major expansions - After Dark, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, Mass Transit, Green Cities, Parklife, Industries, and Campus - an enormous number of free feature updates, and even a console release. Its enduring popularity is well-deserved too; it's a thoroughly entertaining urban planning and traffic management sim, and well-worth checking out.

As for developer Volition's Saints Row 4: Re-Elected which includes all DLC), it's a wonderfully idiotic spin on the open-world gangster genre, this time ramping up the ridiculousness to previously unseen degrees. While early games in the series played it mostly straight, Saints Row 4 throws caution to the wind, delivering a game in which aliens trap our likeable rogue's gallery of heroes in a digital simulation of their beloved city of Steelport.

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DiRT Rally 2.0

Codemasters' wonderful Dirt Rally 2.0, which launched earlier this year to high praise (well, I liked it at least), is getting VR support on PC from today.

There's a free update for the Steam version of the game, while the Oculus Store will be getting its own Dirt Rally 2.0 which comes complete with five exclusive liveries.

It's also worth pointing out that if you've spent some time away from Dirt Rally 2.0, now's a good time to return to it. Alongside VR support on PC, the post-launch support has introduced classic stages from the first game such as Sweet Lamb and Col de Turini, making it closer to being the complete package. If you've got a decent wheel, it's also not a bad little workout for your forearms.

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DiRT Rally 2.0

Codemasters' Dirt Rally 2.0 sees the developer return to the height of its powers, delivering one of the best driving simulations of the current generation and earning a prestigious Eurogamer Essential award. The quality of the racing experience is superb but Codemasters delivers on the visual side too with a beautiful presentation powered by its proprietary Ego engine - but how do the various console versions compare? The answers are surprising.

Perhaps the most important takeaway, however, is that Dirt Rally 2.0 looks and plays well on all consoles, with surprisingly little variance in the graphical feature set across all four versions. There are some rendering differences between the base and enhanced consoles, but the only real disappointment here concerns the PlayStation 4 Pro version of the game - limited to the same 1080p resolution as the base console, with only a smattering of visual upgrades. Meanwhile, Xbox One X offers a revelatory improvement in image quality, using dynamic resolution to move seamlessly between 1800p and full, native 2160p, depending on GPU load.

The standard consoles, meanwhile, both target 1080p, but again, dynamic resolution is in play. Curiously, the vanilla PlayStation 4 delivers full HD (dynamic resolution is a possibility, but all of our measurements resolve at 1080p), giving an overall experience that's perhaps too similar to its Pro equivalent. Only Xbox One S tends to struggle here, with a pixel-count that varies between 1440x810 (but could potentially go lower) all the way up to native 1080p - and even with this more apparent variation in resolution, performance there isn't quite where it needs to be, though still fine overall. All console versions use TAA anti-aliasing - also an option on PC, where MSAA is also available.

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DiRT Rally 2.0

Now this is hardcore. After the 2017 detour of Dirt 4, an accessible and noble experiment in procedural track generation that nevertheless felt like it had gone too far in blunting the edges of the sport it simulated, this is a return to deep, satisfying driving with serious bite. To call Dirt Rally 2.0 a return to form would be underselling it a little; Dirt Rally was arguably Codemasters' first true sim, and in my mind the absolute pinnacle of the racing studio's achievements. This refines and improves that formula in smart, notable ways, for a markedly better game.

That 2.0 might evoke the much-loved sequel to Codemasters' Colin McRae Rally, but really it's a game bearing the name of another sadly departed British great that this commands comparisons to. It's been almost 14 years since Warthog Games' Richard Burns Rally, but it still remains peerless in its simulation of off-road driving, and while Dirt Rally came close its sequel comes closer still. As ever, it's down to a simple matter of taste whether Dirt Rally 2.0 manages to dethrone that all-time great, but for my money there's now no finer off-road sim out there.

Take any given car to any given stage and you'll soon understand what makes Dirt Rally 2.0 special. Take the forward wheel drive Lancia Fulvia around the rain-slicked tarmac of Spain's stages, say, and you can feel the 115 horses under the stubby bonnet slip their way through those front tyres as they spin beyond the edge of adhesion. You can feel the weight shift back as you accelerate up a crest, then feel it pile back on again as the car squirrels under downhill braking, and it's all so tangible, so pliable. The handling in this game, in short, is absolutely sublime.

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DiRT Rally 2.0

Codemasters has confirmed Oculus Rift support is coming to Dirt Rally 2.0 later this year.

Initially, the team had only promised to "explore the possibility" of VR support if there was enough demand from fans (thanks, PC Gamer), but now it's official as a cheeky tweet from the Birmingham-based studio showed an image of an Oculus headset besides a copy of the game.

"We heard you. Oculus heard you. DiRT Rally 2.0 + Oculus = this summer... #RisetotheChallenge," the tweet said, suggesting that VR support will not be available at launch but will come later in the year.

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