Dirt Showdown Review

Dirt Showdown’s intentions are clear from the moment you turn the key. This game wants you to be online, immediately. If you’re not playing it online it wants you to be about it online. Lurking below the intro movie you’ll spot a gentle prod to leap on Twitter and tell the world about the game you’re about to play. It wants your YouTube account settings too and, after activating your online pass, it wants you to register for Racenet, Codies’ new social stat tracking service that works a lot like EA’s Autolog.

If you don’t to do any of this it’s going to keep asking you anyway. If you really aren’t that interested in all this stuff, Dirt Showdown probably isn’t for you. This game honestly doesn’t want you to stay offline for long and will spam you with menu pop-ups until you yield.

Video review available soon.

The game’s frustrating assertiveness aside, things start well. It’s certainly impossible to confuse Dirt Showdown as anything BUT a Codemasters racing game; the presentation itself retains that familiar Codemasters aesthetic, complete with crashing option overlays and smooth transitions between menu levels. It’s slicker than a buttered mongoose.

In-game the news remains positive. The cars are nicely detailed and accumulate muck and dust as the races progress. The environments are raging with spectacle and bursting with fireworks, and the tracks themselves are peppered with destructible objects. It’s a good looking racing game, no doubt, with the kind of visuals for which Codemasters has earned itself a reputation.

The audio presentation is decent too, with a suitable soundtrack and some meaty exhaust notes, although it’s bizarre Codemasters won’t allow us to completely mute the commentary. You can hush the music entirely but you can only lower the commentary to 50% volume. Dirt regular Christian Stevenson has launched into a full-frontal assault on the English language here with a salvo of nonsense that’ll have you quivering in a corner whispering to your dictionary that everything’s going to be okay.

Perpendicular awesomeness? Awesometacular? T-Bone-a-licious? This kind of babble may be quaint scribbled beside a picture of a dinosaur wearing sunglasses on a toddler’s T-shirt but here it’s just dumber than two sacks of hair.

We’re aware this is not Dirt 4; this is something lighter. The problem is it’s too light. We’re not talking about the shallow handling, either. The vehicle physics have been simplified significantly from Dirt 3 but they remain satisfying enough for a game of Showdown’s arcade ilk. No, the problem is that in what feels like no time you’ll have seen all the tracks and event types this game has to offer. Worse still, with many of the game’s already few tracks sharing large sections with one another things get achingly repetitive within a matter of hours. On top of this, while the environments themselves are bristling with personality, many of the actual track layouts are quite dull -- and brief too. The short, flat and entirely unspectacular Miami street courses are notable offenders, as is the diminutive Michigan loop circuit. The Baja tracks are probably the game’s best, on account of at least a few camber and elevation changes, but there isn’t much that's memorable about the rest.

It just feels so scaled back, and yet what’s left has already been done better elsewhere. The Hoonigan events aren’t exactly dissimilar to the gymkhana content available in the excellent Dirt 3, only easier thanks to the more superficial handling model. Doing a donut in Showdown requires just a dab of steering and a mashed throttle. Once you’re circling an object you don’t need to steer, at all. It’s superficial stuff that doesn't really make you feel like you've accomplished anything. The gymkhana-based Joyride mode is a retread of near-identical content in Dirt 3. You begin by performing tricks and nabbing hidden packages around the same Battersea Compound from Dirt 3, before moving to a less interesting Yokohama Docks area. Smashhunters, which has you tracking down sequences of coloured foam bollards, is brief fun but even that doesn’t last.

On account of the limited course selection the race events in particular quickly become bland. Like we said, the handling is pretty shallow and there’s very little here to distinguish it from similar arcade racers. It’s really quite unremarkable. You’d be much better off sticking with the Rallycross and such in Dirt 3 to quench your multi-car circuit racing thirst. The best mode in Showdown's suite of race events is probably Domination, which divides the track into four sections and the best times for each are ranked. Dominate enough of the sectors and you win.

The destruction derbies are really Showdown’s last card to play and, while these modes are far and away the most fun you’ll have in Showdown, they really could’ve been done so much better. For instance, seven opponents out on track with you? It just isn’t enough. Eight cars on track doesn’t cut it. Not in 2012. Not when FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage did 12, with longer and more interesting tracks, almost five years ago. Showdown doesn’t really get things right with the arena events either; they’re based on a time limit rather than last man standing affairs. This means wrecked opponents don’t stay wrecked and if your car’s written-off you simply respawn. Showdown’s turned the destruction derby into Call of Duty. It’s a deathmatch with cars. The tension is lost when you’re not fighting to keep your motor running until the last opponent is toast.

It’s a similar story with the Knock Out mode; what could’ve been an epic battle to be the last car remaining atop a raised platform – like the skyscraper mode way back in Destruction Derby Raw – is nothing of the sort.

Crossover races and a survival mode round out the destruction events but there’s nowhere near enough variety. It’s been a long time since a good destruction derby racer but Showdown pulls up short of the mark. Looking back at the exhaustive range of fun, demolition-themed race types in something like last generation’s Test Drive: Eve of Destruction (or Driven to Destruction outside of the U.S.) it’s genuinely surprising how anaemic Showdown really is. It’s not unlikeable, and the beat up old bangers Codies has crafted certainly have charm (especially the one painted up like Mad Max’s MFP Interceptor), but it’s going to lack lifespan.

Multiplayer, something Showdown’s constant reminders illustrate it’s obviously geared toward, gives things a shot in the arm but it doesn’t last. The normal online racing functions quite well but the destruction events seemed less polished online, with opponent cars flickering and darting around the screen strangely after big collisions. It’s not a patient affair either; it wants you in and out of events within a few minutes and will keep choosing them and throwing them at you until you quit. There are a few extra event types in multiplayer that aren't available in single-player, and Racenet should get friends challenging one another for a brief spell, but ultimately it suffers from the same problem as single-player; it's fun at first but, once you spend a chunk of time in it, its reliance on a handful of race types and a small smattering of courses really starts to grate.

Dirt 3 fans will probably find it pretty hard to be enthusiastic about Showdown, but Showdown never really feels like it’s them anyhow. If you own Dirt 3 you’ll probably just feel short-changed here. If you don’t, you should just buy a copy of Dirt 3 and a copy of FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage; because Showdown cribs from both but exceeds neither.



Source : http://www.ign.com