Long famous for its ultra-realistic, authentic rally experience, Leamington Spa based developers Codemasters have been taking their main rally series, DiRT, in something of a different direction in recent years. Their latest release, DiRT Showdown is the culmination of their efforts to help the franchise appeal to people other than petrol heads, as a rally game that all but does away with rallying in its entirety, instead turning the focus to that other popular use of four wheeled vehicles - banger racing.
Seeing the real life rally cars replaced with hot rods, tuned up bangers, and, er, school buses, DiRT Showdown looks to make things all the more exciting by replacing staggered rallies with full contact races. Whether it's a figure of eight track, where you meet in the middle, or the new Destruction Derby mode, the emphasis here is on bending fenders, and getting up close and personal with your opponents.
Ambulances, too.
On first loading the game up, though, you'd be forgiven for thinking they wanted you to play it at all. Far from letting you get behind the wheel as quickly as possible, you have countless menus to click through first. First you've got to put in your first name, then your surname, then redeem your single-use online pass, without which you can't play online, or upload clips to YouTube, and, finally, sign up for "Racenet". Racenet is Codemasters new idea, which looks to link all of their new racing games together in one big "hub". Setting you regular challenges to complete, it's an attempt to give you an extra incentive to keep playing, as there's always something new to do - but it's incredibly hard to sign up for. For starters, you can't sign up directly on your console - instead, you've got to turn your PC on, head over to the website, and put in a code that the game tells you to enter. Only then will your account be linked with the console. Why you couldn't sign up directly from the console, or directly from the PC is anyone's guess. To make matters worse, the website you have to go to seems to be barely functional, with a confusing interface complicating matters further. Luckily, signing up isn't a requirement - although it won't stop the game prompting you to do it.
Once you've sat through the initial setup (and this optionally includes putting your YouTube details in, too), you'll finally be able to get going - but again, the menus here are very much style over substance - there are no prompts anywhere, telling you to press A to continue, B to go back, or whatever, and things can initially be quite tricky to get your head around. After seeing this and the confusion that was the menus in F1, we've come to the conclusion that Codemasters need a new interface designer - and quickly.
As you may expect, with a different emphasis to the previous DiRT games, the race types on offer in Showdown are suitably different too. Again, there's much more of an emphasis on modes that encourage you to crash into your opponents as much as humanly possible - and the computer cars have been tweaked, too, as they're now much more aggressive, and much less willing to take the moral high road should you leave yourself open to a shunt.
An emphasis on crashing is all well and good, if the crashing actually feels fair, or fun - but in DiRT Showdown, everything seems to have been arranged to make it as annoying as possible. One of the first modes you'll play as you embark on your career is called 8 Ball, which sees you racing around a figure of eight track, which is basically a loop with a crossroads in the middle (shaped like an infinity sign), so traffic going the one way ends up driving in front of traffic going the other way. And it all seems well and good - but it's almost impossible to avoid being hit by a computer player. There's no skill involved here whatsoever - only luck. If a computer player happens to be going through as you try to cross the gap, he's going to take you out, and you'll both end up in a pile of scrap metal at the side of the road. All you can do is grit your teeth and pray. And while this may be OK in online multiplayer (potentially leading to a few light hearted rants amongst friends), in single player, it's just very, very annoying.
The more standard races on here, however, are also in receipt of a more personal approach, thanks to the addition of a few extra features that encourage you to get up close and ram into your opponents. The only problem is... it hasn't really been all that well thought through. With much more aggressive opposition, your opponents will actively try to take you out, or spin you round. This, as you may imagine, can get rather annoying. There's nothing more frustrating than being out in first, and having an annoying computer player spin you into a barrier, leaving everyone else to come past you. And while in the previous games, this wouldn't have been so much of a problem, they've actually got rid of the Flashback function for DiRT Showdown. Before, the Flashbacks would let you rewind the race for a few seconds, and give you a second chance to avoid your opponent - but in Showdown, when you've been spun, you're spun.
Chuffing computer controlled cars! Coming over here, smashing our cars!
Complicating matters further is the boost system. Letting you give your car an extra burst of speed at the touch of a button, you only have a limited amount of boost available at any one time, represented by a small bar. To charge the boost bar, you have to crash into your opponents. Can anyone else see the problem with this? If you get stuck in last place, and end up tailing the pack, you have no opponents to crash into, and therefore can't charge your boost bar. Falling into last place means falling into something of an impossible black hole, meaning you end up getting left even further behind.
What's more, far from being as accessible as we would have hoped, the first time you play each of the events, the game doesn't actually explain what you have to do. Eight races in - after we'd earned an achievement for taking part in a race of each type, a little pop up told us we could press X to view a description of each race. Again, it would have been nice if it would have told us this to begin with, then we wouldn't have had to blindly feel our way through some of the events.
One such initially confusing event is called Head 2 Head, which, while it gives you no explanation whatsoever of what you're meant to do, actually involves throwing your car around a track as quickly as you can, pulling off different stunts - doing doughnuts around a pole, drifting around a corner, or leaping over a bridge, for example. Luckily, as you approach each obstacle, it does tell you what you're meant to be doing, and the whole thing feels like a more streamlined version of the Gymkhana mode from DiRT 3.
The last set of events follow the philosophy of destruction derbies, and, rather than racing, the sole objective here is to destroy your opponents - either by ramming them, or pushing them off a raised platform, sumo style. Again, this is fun enough to begin with - throwing your car at high speeds into a pile of cars who're struggling to stay in/push each other out is a lot of fun - but then you start to notice that you seem to be coming last a lot, despite pushing plenty of cars off. Sadly, it turns out that Codemasters have completely messed up the scoring system for these modes. Smash your way into a pile of cars that are teetering on the edge, and you'll be lucky if you get points for a single push, because it registers the person who touched the car first, rather than the one who provided the most of the force. Sadly, it can't even get that right most of the time, as the video below shows. We didn't get a single point for this - see if you can guess why, because we certainly can't.
And then we come to the online side of things. Again, Codemasters have stuck to the same tack as with previous games, but we've never really liked how these things work - and it's not phenomenally fair here, either. Should you venture into the online mode, you're only allowed to use cars that you've unlocked during the single player. Basically meaning you don't stand a chance until you've finished the entire game and unlocked the best cars, there's no point even trying to look online (at least if you're wanting to play with randoms), as everyone online, inevitably, has already seen, done, and unlocked everything there is to unlock - and as such, will wipe the floor with you, without giving you a chance. There is a split-screen mode in here, too, but it's equally disappointing. Only allowing two players robs a game like this of the fun it could have been - four players, like the hilarious Crash Time 4 should really have been a requirement.
But perhaps what's most disappointing is that, with DiRT Showdown, Codemasters had a chance to take their previously fairly testing entry requirements, and drop them completely, opening the door to an arcade, off the wall, truly accessible mix of destruction bliss. Instead, we've got a game that'll likely confuse any novices to the series, or put them off entirely thanks to its bizarre punishment of those of us who are less skilled. Taking out the flashback (which only existed to make things easier for beginners), making it so you can only fill the boost gauge by crashing, meaning that should you sink to the back of the pack, you're effectively in no-man's land - there are plenty of things working against the very players that DiRT Showdown should really have been hoping to attract. If you can work your way around its flaws, the stunt oriented sections are OK, and the races have their moments (should you not end up in last place), but overall, DiRT Showdown is just a missed opportunity.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
