Dirt 5 (PS4, 2020)
Before Dirt 5, I had played four Dirt games. Dirt 3 was a fun mixture of different kinds of offroad racing and Ken Block. It also had Manchester Orchestra on the soundtrack. Dirt 4 was a strange mix of that and normal rally driving. Dirt Rally cleared that up by being much more focused on one thing, and also included the full Pikes Peak hillclimb course. Dirt Rally 2.0 is one of the most infuriating games I've ever played, and I may yet finish it one day.
Dirt 5 has, DLC included, 227 career events. Almost all of them are races against other cars. Some are time trials. Some are 'Path Finder' events where you go up a steep, severe rocky hill climb. Some of the DLC events include checkpoint races on custom courses, and there are Gymkhana events where you have to do stunts to beat a certain score within a time limit. The game features a range of off road vehicles including rally cars, rallycross, buggies, pickup trucks, and others.
There you go. I've described the entirety of Dirt 5. I can't say this in any great detail or with any insight, but if you've done one race in this game you've done them all. Nothing has any consequence, no race has any stakes or strategy, there's no setup to change, you just drive for five minutes and win and that's that.
I spent about thirty hours going through all of these events and the most impressive thing was how consistent the game is. Consistently unremarkable, but consistent. It's probably ironic that this much consistency in a racing game comes across as such a negative to me, but here we are. There are some secondary goals for you to aim for in a race - time spent above a certain speed, time spent in the air, overtaking while drifting, that sort of thing - which let you increase your standings with sponsors. The sponsors are irrelevant though, you unlock a couple of stickers for custom liveries you're never going to look at and you'll have more than enough money from winning the races in order to buy every car anyway.
I don't remember Dirt 3 well enough to know if it had any sort of structure in the background outside of the racing, but Dirt 5 apparently has something resembling a story. Between races you occasionally get some guys on a podcast talking to you about offroad racing and how amazing it is. And how important the Dirt Tour is. I guess that's what I was racing in. And then there's a final boss race against a guy named Bruno who they don't like. But you never see these people, and the talking comes over the top of the music in the background and while you're still going through the menus looking at stuff, so I think I was halfway through the game before I stopped treating it as an interruption rather than something I might have benefitted from paying attention to.
Ultimately this very thin attempt to introduce context is as shallow and flimsy as the races themselves. Since this game was released in late 2020 I don't know if Covid played a part here but the racing feels like the basics were finished then left, and the voiceovers were thrown in last minute. The people talking may as well be disembodied voices inside my head.
I could look past all of this if the game was enjoyable to drive. It's not. The sponsor objectives encourage you to drift, but any attempt to get the car sideways sees you lose lots of speed and lots of places. For an off-road racing game the environment seems very inconsequential too. You notice some sliding when driving on ice, but there's very little difference between tarmac, mud, gravel, rocks, snow or puddles. The water effects are especially hilarious. Nothing happens to your car when you drive through water. It doesn't get bogged down, no splashes come up, nothing. As you might imagine, this all contributes to the game feeling quite basic.
It doesn't look that great either. I played the PS4 version. This was also one of the first PS5 games, so I'm sure a better version of it exists. But then Gran Turismo Sport was released on PS4 in 2017, and look at that. Three things stand out about how Dirt 5 looks. First one of my recurring pet hates in racing games, a photo mode you can only access by pausing a race. There's no replay feature, so if you want to take a picture of a dramatic, exciting race you need to stop it and spend ten minutes fiddling about with the filters and effects. Terrible.
Most races also feature a rapid time of day change. Too rapid, because the longest race is about five minutes and you're just very aware that the sun doesn't come up that quickly and it doesn't get that bright that quickly. It feels like style over substance, but it's not even style done well. And on that note, the third graphical problem is trying to drive at night. The headlights on every car are like something from one of those Top Gear specials when they're in the middle of nowhere in Asia driving something with fridge lights for headlights. If you're driving at night in this game you cannot see a thing, and that ends up as fun as it sounds.
For all its blandness, there is one interesting part of Dirt 5. The Playgrounds feature lets you create custom tracks and events and share them for others to play. Much like any such feature it's filled with hugely complex, imaginative courses already which feel like they'd take you months and a few degrees to figure out how to make yourself. The options for searching through these to find good ones also seems a bit awkward. Plus there are lots that are like those custom races in GTA Online where you end up way up in the air driving on shipping containers and narrow planks. These courses don't really serve much purpose in themselves, but they're almost always a bigger test of your driving skills than the base game, so that's something.
I don't think there's going to be a Dirt 6. Good.
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