![]() ![]() I saw MotorStorm most in Dirt 5’s uphill sections, most of which are at a stupefying grade you’d simply never find in real life. It’s sort of an off-road Neapolitan: Dirt Rally 2.0 for the chocolate Dirt 4 the vanilla and Dirt 5 is your strawberry, brightly colored and very sweet. Taken together, however, I think they’re a library of three titles serving distinct needs and interests, and just as playable today as the day they launched. ![]() And that game was a response to the more mass-market Dirt 4, which feathered in accessibility concessions and appeal to its core rallying feature set. The arcade/action tack the series has taken is a sharp turn away from the tough rallying sim they got in Dirt Rally 2.0. The demanding Dirt audience is somewhat divided, though, and I can understand it. If Dirt 5 is an homage to Evolution’s best work, then it’s a beautiful one. Oh yeah, that waterfall of sparks up ahead is MotorStorm as hell. Two Evolution developers - albeit DriveClub alumni, not MotorStorm - are among the senior design credits. ![]() Codemasters absorbed Evolution in early 2016 after Sony announced plans to close it down. Like I said, it’s just the feeling of being back in MotorStorm, a festival-type, arcade racing experience I’ve been badly missing.Īnd it makes sense: Codemasters Cheshire, the developers for this entry in the series, is the descendant of MotorStorm maker Evolution Studios. And these comparisons are by no means dead-on matches. Sure, there’s no nitrous boost, nor any shortcuts on the course. And then scrambling uphill over the loose rock strewn around Foci di Giova in Dirt 5, and sweeping an ultra-long right at full throttle absolutely felt like peeling around the crater’s rim on Pacific Rift’s Caldera Ridge. Lion’s Head also has a fork in the trail that spits you into an immediate hard left, which made me think of a terrible bottleneck in Mudslide, also from Pacific Rift. But there is a steep uphill right turn on Dirt 5’s Lion’s Head course that gave me mind’s-eye recollections of Razorback, a great run in Pacific Rift. Sure, the pre-race countdown (a succession of closeups) is a straight lift from the PlayStation 3’s MotorStorm: Pacific Rift - one of my all-time favorite racers. Dirt 5 is the only video game to give me the sense of place in another video game: MotorStorm. It’s really not much fun at all, but it’s over so quickly that there’s no time to feel bitter before you’re swept off to the next multi-coloured location for something completely different.Video games often strive to give the player a sense of place for somewhere in real life. Sprint racing is one such acquired taste, its cars’ huge, lopsided wings obscuring your view of the track and, like a broken shopping trolley, constantly forcing you slightly to the left. It’s just as well, because there are some events that don’t always work very well. The continual breathless renewal suits the game’s brash, in-your-face styling. It also means that when you don’t enjoy a particular event, for example one with lots of rocks and a narrow track where random collisions can drop you into an irretrievable last place through no real fault of your own, you know that the next race will be completely different. It’s successful in keeping things feeling fresh and surprising, even when you’ve driven a course multiple times.Įvents are similarly diverse, even if ultra cross, rally raid, stampede, and land rush appear to be functionally identical, their reliance on different classes of car helps give them a distinct feel. Or frequently you’ll start a race in daylight, before the sun sets in the second lap leaving the latter half of the race in darkness. To add to the visual spectacle you’ll find blizzards, thunderstorms, sandstorms, rainbows, and appearances by the aurora borealis, while on the tracks themselves there are tubes belching plumes of fire into the air, low flying aircraft trailing smoke from their wing tips, and jumps galore.ĭirt 5 also specialises in changing conditions during the course of a race, so you might start in the dry before encountering a rainstorm, which dries up by the third lap. ![]() Brightly painted favelas, Greek ruins, lush jungles, and the frozen Hudson River await your screeching tyres, but as always Dirt wants to push things further. It makes even Lara Croft’s travel itineraries look pedestrian by comparison.Īll the tracks are big, bold and colourful with each of the world’s regions recreated with an emphasis on fun. With 70 routes through 10 locations around the world, you’ll ping pong between China, Norway, Greece, Nepal, South Africa, and more. Skipping ahead is something you’ll need to do a lot as you progress through career mode, which as tradition dictates sees you work your way up from plucky outsider to becoming the king of rally, via a range of different car classes, event styles, and courses. ![]()
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