It may not be called DiRT 2: Electric Boogaloo, but for fans of realistic offroad racing games, there is something electrifying about this upcoming driving game from Codemasters. Slated to be released this September on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PSP, Wii, DS, and PC, the game is promising to offer more of the great road-less racing driving fans got in the original.

Taking the wheel of the 360 version, we took a rally car for a drive around a muddy track the team made up on the streets of Shibuya, Japan, complete with a jump you won’t want to miss, especially if you’re not wearing your seatbelt. We also drove a course in Croatia that had us driving the streets of a mountainside village, as well as one they also built in and around London’s Battersea Power Station, which is best known in the U.S. for being where Pink Floyd shot the cover to their 1977 album Animals (hence our request that they include an achievement for winning an event there called “Pigs On The Wing 1”).

DiRT 2 E3 2009 Trailer

In each of these, we found the controls to be tight and responsive, though decidedly leaning more along the lines of a sim than an arcade racer. It’s not totally sim-ish, but the game is certainly not an arcade racer. This was especially evident when we drove a trophy truck around the Baja course, and we spun around more than an Olympic ice skater in the semi-finals. But if you play a lot of sim-style racing games, you probably won’t have as much trouble with it as we did. Though even we got better with it after a couple of tries. And a Snicker’s bar. 

One of the game’s producers also told us that the game would feature both a robust career mode as well as numerous multiplayer modes, though he didn’t go into much detail. Or he did and we were too busy trying not to drive the truck off the road to pay attention.

It should be noted that, outside the U.S., the game will be called Colin McRae’s DiRT 2, as it is actually the latest in the long-running Colin McRae Rally series. Though it’s a bittersweet entry, since McRae, the Scottish rally driver, actually died in September of 2007 a few months after the original DiRT was released.