By Luke Reilly, JScore: 9.2 Read the full Dirt 4 Review My key criticism of the career mode is that the variety it appears to offer doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Accessible yet tough and grimy yet gorgeous, Dirt 4 sets a new standard in rally racing – and its well-considered career mode and endless stages inject it with tremendous stamina. Back then Codemasters’ rally games were the yardstick against which all other racers with off-road aspirations were measured (at least up until the likes of Richard Burns Rally and WRC: Rally Evolved). Hearing Grist’s pace notes again – a voice drilled into my brain in the late ’90s and early 2000s via my ravenous consumption of all games beginning with the word ‘Colin’ – has taken me back nearly 20 years. It’s perhaps symbolic that Codemasters has included Colin McRae’s old co-driver in Dirt 4 for the first time in one of its rally games since Colin McRae Rally 2005, because Dirt 4 very much feels like a return to the good old days of the series. It was particularly entertaining hearing the highly-recognisable voices of video game VO veterans Troy Baker and Nolan North regularly sniping at each other in the guise of two rival races. Hosted by Donut Media presenters James Pumphrey and Nolan Sykes, it’s a low-fi approach – no character models, no cutscenes – but even though the segments are entirely inessential I have to admit I bought into the silly back-and-forth and listened to every one of them. There’s even a light story woven throughout the career which unfolds exclusively in a series of in-game podcast snippets sprinkled between events as you progress. With Dirt Rally 2.0 competently overseeing that department nowadays, Dirt 5’s career mode is now an arcade-oriented mosaic of mostly pack racing events across tracks in 10 global locations, including New York, Arizona, China, Norway, Brazil, Greece, South Africa, Morocco, Italy, and Nepal. Gone, too, is Dirt 4’s custom rally stage generator tool, and with it, any regular point-to-point rallying at all, actually.
There are certainly differences in the way a custom-built buggy tackles terrain compared to, say, a rear-wheel drive retro rally car (and there are also some subtle variations in grip across the different surface types – especially ice) but overall it’s a bit more basic and I found the handling quickly tameable. Built on the bones of Codemasters Cheshire’s Onrush, Dirt 5 actually doesn’t feel anything like its direct predecessor, ditching its two-pronged “simulation” versus “gamer” approach to handling options for a single, easy-to-grasp driving model. Land Rush HourIronically enough, one key game Dirt 5 roundly ignores is Dirt 4.
This cocktail of influences combines for a well-executed racer, albeit one that seems content to iterate rather than innovate. There’s even a touch of Trackmania’s custom track builder and some subtle hints of SEGA Rally Revo, RalliSport Challenge, and Gravel to boot. There’s a heavy handful of Dirt 2’s brashness, a dash of Dirt 3’s gymkhana mode, and a limited sprinkle of MotorStorm’s rough-and-ready brand of fender bending (Dirt 5 even features racing in Monument Valley, the location of the original MotorStorm). That said, Driveclub is far from the single influence on Dirt 5. This game handles night lighting and extreme weather with particular panache.
Like Driveclub, Dirt 5 is a mix of doorhandle-to-doorhandle arcade pack racing and bleeding-edge visuals. However, it makes a lot more sense when you consider Dirt 5 was developed by Codemasters Cheshire – the studio formerly known as Evolution, which made Driveclub before being cut loose from Sony and scooped up by Codemasters in 2016. For a series with its own long and firmly established history, that Driveclub comparison I just threw at you may come as a slight curveball.
0 kommentar(er)
