Once upon a time I was playing Gran Turismo 5 online with a few strangers. We were all tearing around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course when I accidently took a corner too quickly, and bumped into the guy next to me. What proceeded was a string of profanities that would have made a Soprano blush.
Look, I LOVE sim racing, and I love clean racing. It’s one of my favorite hobbies. But as a guy, sometimes I just have a deep rooted desire to watch stuff go KABOOM. Sometimes, the immature dork within me just wants to be the one car tearing in the opposite direction of everyone else on Laguna Seca.
Common sense and courtesy prevent me from acting on these desires in GT5 or Forza. I don’t have to worry about these things in DiRT Showdown.
You see, at its heart, DiRT Showdown is not so much a racing game as it is a playground. It’s not about cars or tracks; it’s about vehicular slaughter. It’s not about coming in first place; it’s about how many hapless fools you can take out on your way to first place. In essence, it’s road rage in the palm of your hands.
And it is a LOT of fun.
Make no mistake about it, DiRT Showdown is a balls to the wall arcade racer. Those who are expecting a spiritual successor to the core DiRT series should check their familiarity at the door. There are very few, if any, sim elements to this game. The vehicle handling is made for action; this means it is very “assist” friendly. Yes, you can turn up the difficulty where your car may slide around a bit more than normal, but for the most part, this game is going to control more like a Burnout than a GT5. Controls are sharp and responsive, and within minutes, any gamer will be able to accelerate, brake, and boost to their heart’s desire. There’s no speedometer, no tachometer, and you’ll never know what gear you need to be in. Just make sure you have a lead foot, and you’ll be fine.
The career mode is laid out as simply as can be. There are a number of progressively more difficult tours, each with a number of events. That’s it. There’s no need to waste any time with anything else. The different events are all fantastically fun. There’s straight circuit races on a figure 8 course. There’s a destruction derby. There’s Hoonigan Events (basically gymkhana). There’s my personal favorite: Knock Out Mode, which is basically sumo wrestling (a number of cars battle it out on a raised platform to push all the others off).
Regardless of the event, your goal, first and foremost, is to destroy the other cars on the track. This is evident by the fact that this is one of the few racing games where each car has a life gauge. You also get points for pretty much any type of destruction you can dish out. Just t-bone another car? Points. Rear end someone? Points. Complete destroy another driver? Mega points.
There’s a strange feel to the events in DiRT Showdown, however. There’s no finality to your actions…no consequences. You can make a wrong move or be taken out by an opponent, but you simply respawn. You RESPAWN…in a racing game. The concept makes for a game that can be attractive to a wider breadth of the mainstream audience, but at the end of the day, there’s simply no sense of urgency to your actions. You can screw up all you want, and short of a slight point deduction, you’re back in the thick of things.
Interestingly enough, the variety of different events is also where DiRT Showdown’s major weaknesses lie; there simply isn’t enough of them. There’s only a handful of different events on a handful of different locations. You can only mix and match so much before you’ve seen and done it all. Unless DiRT Showdown plans on supplementing with DLC; the game could potentially get old very quickly.
There’s a good variety of different cars, but even that’s not as impressive as it may seem on the surface. I don’t know about you, but unless the cars are real-world, licensed vehicles, they really don’t mean much to me, regardless of the number of cars available. In an arcade styled racing game where driving skill isn’t really a necessity, the cars don’t seem all that different. Essentially what you have are the same cars (with some slight differences in weight and handling) with different skins. There are a few licensed cars in the game (Ford Fiesta, Subaru Impreza, Scion TC to name a few), but there just isn’t enough. Truth be told, that’s more of a personal gripe and probably won’t bother too many people.
Presentation-wise, the game is a visual treat. The car models are all richly detailed and the environmental effects are top notch. Mud accumulates on the car, water splashes around, and snow gets kicked up in a dense spray as you drive. Codemasters has always been extremely adept at creating a “dirty” style of racing, and that hasn’t changed one bit in DiRT Showdown. The surrounding arenas that you race in are also fantastic to look at…if you get a chance to glance at them. There’s fireworks a-plenty and bright, pulsating lights everywhere. The game’s presentation is outlandishly in-your-face, and it makes for a fun experience.
On the audio front, things are about as decent as one might expect. There’s a pretty good rock soundtrack, and the overall tone is pointed squarely toward “adrenaline.” The in-race announcer I didn’t find as grating as some other review sites did. Yes, he’s pretty annoying; really annoying, actually, but in a game like this, there’s no need for an announcer to speak “like a sir.”
And then there’s RaceNet…Codemasters’ version of Autolog from the Need For Speed series. RaceNet is clearly Codemasters’ new baby, as its presence it quite prominent. It is a stat tracking social network that will be universally used across all Codemasters games starting with DiRT Showdown. RaceNet will keep track of your wins, best times, XP, etc. and you can also see all the same stats from your friends.
You’re going to want to spend some time with multiplayer because 1) via RaceNet you can unlock certain upgrades and liveries for your cars, and 2) Smash and Grab. Smash and Grab is essentially Oddball from Halo, one of my favorite multiplayer modes in recent memory. Oddball with cars? Yeah, it’s as fun as it sounds.
At the end of the day, DiRT Showdown really ends up being a fun expansion to DiRT 3. It has a number of thrilling concepts and its presentation and delivery are done quite well…there just isn’t enough of it to warrant treating it as a standalone game.
