Colin McRae and Tony Hawk have a lot in common. Both once dominated their sport, winning championships, setting world records and endorsing various products. Their first PlayStation outings were well received, combining solid gameplay with a name that the public could recognise. From there sprouted sequel after sequel, each one building on the last, surviving the leap to the next-gen platforms and thriving on their profits. The Colin McRae Rally series may not have been quite the runaway success that the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (THPS) has been, but like its compatriot it brought a new standard of gameplay and presentation to a niche genre that needed it.

With all series comes a crunch point and for THPS, it was the fourth game. Once all your objectives are complete, all the features implemented, the graphics optimised and the gameplay perfected, there isn’t much more you can do. You can walk the risky rope of further updates or you can reinvent the series. Neversoft chose the sensible option and along came Underground. Codemasters are now upon the same point, dipping their feet in the waters of annual updates and seeing if anything bites. Colin McRae Rally 2005 is a resounding completion point in the series, a fulfillment of all the aims you’d want to achieve in a game like this. For them, it’s mission accomplished. Where they head next is up to them, but if I were managing director, I’d give the series a break and let it evolve into something different. Colin has done a lot for the British software company and he needs a well deserved rest after this latest excursion.

The first thing you’ll notice about the new game is that there’s not much different from the 2004 version. Apart from the replacement of the minimalist menu with a more visually striking one and the inclusion of full Xbox Live support, there’s little here that you won’t have seen before. You can take on any single stage, full rally or custom rally alone or with friends offline via alternate play. Go a step further and there’s the option to race the whole championship as Colin, while Career mode combines a whole host of events in a marathon journey to the top of the sport. As in almost every racing game, you can undertake a time trial to perfect your technique, except here your score is uploaded to the rest of the world via Xbox Live so you can compare times with friends and strangers, just like the previous game in the series.

Apart from the pumped-up 300 bhp, 4-wheel-drive road cars that feature in the World Rally Championship, there’s 2-wheel drive, 4-wheel Classics, Super 2-wheel, Rear Wheel, Distinctive and 4×4 classics classes available, so you can race in anything from Suburu Imprezas (everyone’s favourite) and Mitsubishi Lancers to Mini Coopers and Mk1 Ford Escorts. With over 30 cars in total, with most locked from the start, there’s enough here to tempt even the slight petrolhead into the Career mode where they can be retrieved. Codemasters also make use of their clever, revenue-collecting cheat system, whereby you have to phone a premium phoneline and register online to get codes unique to your game. If you want to take a shortcut to the prizes, then you’ll have to pay the price, literally.

The rallying experience brought over from previous games has been tweaked again and is of the caliber you’d expect. Each car feels different, but it’s done so convincingly that you’ll begin to notice the difference between 4-wheel-drive cars and their 2-wheel counterparts. The handling is again spot on, with a learning curve that rises fairly evenly after a shaky start. Some may have trouble getting used to the rally dynamics and the way the controls are built around the way cars slide around the track, powering from corner to corner, but most will get used to it after an hour or so. Mastering the handling is another matter though. After several hours of play, you’ll be able to take most corners at a reasonable speed, but there’ll always be one somewhere along the route where it’ll test your skills and reactions to the limit. Added into the 2005 version is a mystifying ‘hard steer’ button, which seems to speed up the pace of steering when held down. This is meant to improve lock-to-lock cornering and perfecting the use of this extra feature can shave seconds off your times if used correctly, but it’s something that feels a little alien to begin with. The Xbox controller suits the game superbly, offering three separate ways of accelerating and braking, while providing suitable feedback through the vibration motors. The triggers are the real heroes of the gamepad though, allowing you to drift around corners at a set speed; something the PS2 version just can’t offer.

While some stages are clearly recognisable from previous Colin McRaes, they are well designed and accurately mirror real life routes. All of them feature alternating road surfaces and a variety of corner types, constantly testing your aptitude and timing. Now that the advances in graphics allow levels to appear infinitely large, boundaries are as invisible as they’re meant to be, so if you crash off the side of a track, you’re really going to launch your car a distance and make a big mess of it at the same time. This makes woodland stages more intense, as recovering from slides and knocks wastes valuable time while missing a corner completely sees you going through ranks of trees before your position is reset. Of course if you plough right off course, roll the car or head toward bystanders, then the game repositions you back onto the track in the correct place. The level designers have also been quite crafty in their use of false turnings. As in real stages, there’ll be roads that have been blocked off, but when you’re charging along at 80 mph, you have to make snap decisions as to whether the turn is a legitimate one and make sure you listen to your co-driver who gives you directions.

Rallying is a real departure from the street-based shenanigans that most racers are centered around. With the simple aim of getting from A to B in the shortest time, there’s more focus on technique and keeping the car in tact. Between stages in rallies, you’ll be presented with a service area screen where you can repair, test and tweak your car. Harm inflicted by the comprehensive damage model is carried over to each race if it isn’t fixed and there’s a limit on how much you can patch up, so there’s always that extra pressure on you to bring the car back in one piece. When the going gets tough and you’re thundering through a woodland track in the driving rain, it’s like the survival horror equivalent of driving games; get out alive as fast as possible or face destruction.

Online play is handled by the Xbox’s standardised Live network, with Quick Match and Optimatch present as expected. You can race any selection of stages with various car class restrictions, weather conditions and so on, just like you can do offline. Everyone races at the same time, but not directly on the same track, so all you’ll see is the ghosts of your opponents’ cars. Because of the way this works, the only lag ever present will be in the phantom representation of where everyone else is, so your online experience is always as smooth as it is offline. Everyone starts with 1500 points which the world rankings are formed from, with every result adding or deducting from your score. The online mode isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it does well to integrate the main game with the world of Xbox Live.

Graphically, Colin McRae is again spectacular, with ever widening landscapes as far as the eye can see and superb car detail throughout. The terrain is varied and well animated, with grass swaying in the wind before you, while the vehicle damage model does its best to strip the cars of their bodywork as fast as possible. The game runs at a blistering pace throughout, never glitching or showing any slowdown, even online. Camera angles have been extended to include a bonnet camera and a second adjusted third person camera. Fans of the series will also be pleased to know that the cockpit view makes a reappearance, making night stages through forests particularly terrifying.

The game’s replay value really depends on whether or not the Xbox Live and Career modes grab your attention and pull you in. The balanced gameplay serves the gameplay well, with plenty of practice required to master the handling and stages that the game presents. As with all racing games though, there’s only a certain amount of time that you’re really going to continue playing the same tracks with the same cars because after all, it is one of the more linear genres out there. There’s certainly enough here to keep a dedicated racing fan happy for months though, with unlockable extras, a whole series of challenges and online play.

With all things considered, Colin McRae Rally 2005 is the best game in the series and offers the greatest value-for-money of any of them, but you can’t help feeling that it’s more of an update than a new game. If you’ve already got the 04 version, then all you’re really paying £40 for is the online mode, and whether that’s worth it is debatable. If you’re new to the series, then by all means spend the money on what is a superb rally game, but if you’ve been following the series for a while, you might want to give it a rent before parting with your hard earned cash.

The Colin McRae series is at a T-junction in its life. Codemasters’ can turn left and continue on the uncertain path of incremental updates in the style of EA Sports, collecting regular revenue but saturating their own niche genre with similar games, risking losing sales in the process. After all, once you’ve got 2005, why would you buy 2006 if it’s going to be only a little different? Turing right will lead to following Neversoft’s example with the Tony Hawk series; reinvigorating the game concept with some fresh ideas. If you don’t adapt to people’s needs and keep up with the competition, then they’ll go somewhere else - it’s already happening with FIFA and PES. It would be a real shame to see Colin McRae lose its edge and become the victim of its own success, so let’s just hope that Codemasters do the sensible thing and chooses the right path.