According to Codemasters, Dirt Showdown will be its most connected game ever. Codemasters is investing a lot of energy in spruiking the game’s extensive multiplayer options, as well as its new social tracking service RaceNet (which you can read about here), but solo play hasn’t been left out of the equation.
After some hands-on time with the first half-a-dozen events in Career Mode the divide Dirt Showdown is attempting to straddle is clear. The menu overlays and transitions instantly smack of the Dirt series players have come to admire and the car and track visuals themselves retain that familiar Codemasters aesthetic. It’s abundantly obvious, however, that Dirt 4 this is not. This is something a bit left-of-centre.
The action in Showdown is divided across three categories. There’s circuit racing on tight courses peppered with obstacles, shortcuts, and jumps, there are ‘Hoonigan’ events focusing on the freestyle stunt driving that has made Ken Block a YouTube deity, and there are demolition derbies.
The brief taste of the fairly standard circuit racing we had actually proved surprisingly unremarkable, at least in single-player. It’s hard to get too emotionally attached to the unlicensed cars that make up the bulk of the vehicle roster in Showdown and the racing itself didn’t really seem altogether different from similar arcade racers.
Things improved for the Hoonigan events on hand to test; these freestyle driving trials are significantly more engaging and are satisfyingly tricky. Players will be challenged to string together a series of high-speed drifts, donuts and more in a fashion not dissimilar to the Gymkhana content in Dirt 3. It becomes most evident here the handling model has been honed somewhat; it’s more arcade-like. It’s accessible yet shallow. Dirt devotees may find themselves divided on this issue.
The destruction events were the most spectacular in our preview build and represented half of the available events we could test. Two of them were arena contests where the object of the game was to build up points by ramming and writing-off opponents, and the other was a race on a small course with multiple crossovers. The racing works well, with the crossovers adding the risk of sickening T-bones on every lap, and the second of the arena-style events was particularly fun too. Set on an elevated platform players are awarded points for knocking other cars off and onto the ground below. It may remind older gamers of the Skyscraper Mode in Destruction Derby Raw, released way back in 2000 on the original PlayStation, although the difference here is cars knocked off the platform can get back into the mix via one of a series of ramps positioned around it.
Codemasters’ knack for crunching collisions is front-and-centre in Showdown’s demolition events and it’s as impressive as ever. Players will be able to view especially impressive crashes from multiple angles via Showdown’s new ‘Crashback’ system and, in single-player events, upload clips directly to YouTube.
As a sideshow to the standard, broader Dirt series we wonder a little about lasting appeal. The point of progressing is to build up cash you can spend on purchasing and upgrading your vehicles, but overall there does seem to be significantly less variety here than Dirt 3 and you could certainly build an argument at this stage that the best parts of Showdown could’ve been absorbed as additional modes in the current Dirt formula. However, we haven’t seen all there is to the game yet, and the racing we have seen is typically robust.
Dirt Showdown will hit shelves late May.
Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and Die Hard on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.
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