It truly breaks my heart reading user reviews trying to understand why Dirt 5 is considered to be such a bad game, only to find out that we’ve reached the point where, through the modern player’s experience, “arcade racer” is equivalent to “bad video game”. I could go further about how modern game enjoyers seem to misunderstand the design philosophy of classic arcade games, but Dirt 5 is not the right game for that. Either way, I’m once again playing some level of defense for another game that doesn’t deserve the level of hate it’s getting. Let me put it this way: The rallies in Dirt 4 are literally procedurally generated (i.e. garbage), and I think Dirt 5 deserves a little more credit from a design perspective. Though on the flip side, this has nowhere near the level of depth you’d get from previous games such as Dirt 2. This is a mixed bag we’re looking at.
As a fan of arcade style video games, it’d be silly for me to knock this against Dirt 5, which was clearly intended to be arcade style from the get go. It’s apparent from the visual presentation that this is no racing sim, and this has almost always been the case for Codemasters racing games from the seventh gen onwards (with exceptions for Dirt Rally and the F1 series). It has licensed cars, but the physics are more springy and less realistic. Yet, this design worked perfectly fine for early Grid and Dirt games, so I see no reason why it couldn’t work for this. More importantly though, the arcade-focused design isn’t one of the reasons why this game feels like it’s lacking.
One of the main complaints I’ve seen for Dirt 5 is that it doesn’t contain any traditional rally stages. This is true, although this does have handmade point-to-point track layouts in the form of Rally Raid events. I wouldn’t consider this a major detriment, though it does raise questions about the game’s track design philosophy. Most of these tracks are wide, made to accommodate for the dozens of cars that are going to be buzzing around you. Credit to Codemasters, these tracks are dazzled up and pretty. Each track has tons of details and visual style with the environment, especially when it comes to weather and lighting effects. Dirt 5 tries to stimulate you with constant effects while you’re speeding through each track, but once you’ve gotten your fill on sparkly lights and vibrant colors, the problems start to become more apparent.
These track layouts rarely ever provide any kind of challenge. In addition to the wideness of the tracks, most of these layouts have little that you can’t figure out in your first couple of laps. Every turn is telegraphed obviously, with only marginal room for improvement on the player’s part. Instead, the challenge comes from the persistent AI, which is more irritating than it is engaging. Although I don’t mind focusing on lap times, Dirt 5 doesn’t give the player much incentive to try and perfect these corners, especially when there’s a swarm of cars pestering them.
Another complaint I’ve heard that I totally agree with is the lack of variety with terrain physics. What the hell ever happened to snow and ice physics in rally games?! Despite the visual differences, mud, dirt, and snow, as well as every weather effect, all require the same input from the driver to navigate. Add onto this the lack of driving differences between the various cars, and you have a recipe for boredom quickly establishing itself. Worse still, the three ‘challenges’ for each event are procedurally generated, resulting in thoughtless objectives that are sometimes literally impossible to complete depending on the event. Codemasters’ fix for this is a ‘refresh’ button that gives you a different set of challenges to complete, but I wouldn’t call it a challenge if the intention is to find which ones are actually doable!
Despite my gripes, most of this game plays perfectly fine as far as arcade-hybrid rally game physics are concerned. It’s lacking in nuance, though the driving holds up fine when compared to other offroad games in a similar style, such as the Motorstorm series. But Dirt 5 is missing much of the fun you’d get from other arcade style racing games, because it’s lacking a sense of progression. Part of the arcade experience involves having to learn and improve to get better at the game’s challenges. But from start to finish, Dirt 5 makes me feel like I’m doing the same races over and over again. The cars don’t get any faster, the tracks don’t get any more tricky, and the races don’t get any more exciting. This feels like a game you pick up and play just to kill time.
If a ‘killing time’ game is all you’re looking for, then Dirt 5 delivers well. But the problem is that fans of Codemasters games are looking for more than that. Codemasters always had a strong sense of variety that kept their games exciting, and you can tell how massive these differences are when you go back to the early Dirt games. That difference in car classes and track design is completely lost here. And as much as I think Dirt 5 serves as a passable racing game, it’s clear that the first 3 Dirt games completely surpass this. If you’re wondering why I don’t hate this game, it’s because I thought the experience was fun for a few hours at least. But if you’re spending 60, or god forbid 80 dollars to play this game, you’re not going to get your money’s worth out of it.
Full disclosure, I had no trouble running this on my laptop, though I’ve read reviews mentioning performance issues, so you might want to investigate based on which device you’re playing it on.
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bafflingly bad.