Dirt 5 Review – An Approachable And Exciting Off-Road Racer

Dirt 5 is the latest title in off-road racing from Codemasters. It features mud tires, whiplash-inducing drifts, breakingneck speeds and muddy tires. Dirt 5 offers an arcade-style experience that allows more people to participate in the race. With a variety of events to take on, you’re never at a shortage of routes to drive and donuts to do.

Dirt 5 continues the series’ hallmark of delivering terrific off-road racing. The tight controls make it easy to travel the globe and pass beautiful sites by speeding through them. I loved tearing through a muddy course under the shimmering Aurora Borealis in Norway and drifting around an icy corner with New York’s Roosevelt Island Bridge serving as the backdrop.

Performing well in Dirt 5’s races requires you to master the delicate balance of when to accelerate, brake, and throw the handbrake for harsh drifts. This light-speed calculus becomes even more complicated when you have to take into account other vehicles that can soften your cornering, or how the different surfaces feel when you’re going into a turn at 60 miles-per-hour; I can be more reckless on muddy surfaces than I can on ice, while the pavement is much less conducive to drifting. It is amazing to feel how different surfaces affect the performance of your car. Driving in darkness or other inclement conditions adds another layer to the challenge. Heavy snow, which can cause poor visibility, and track lighting that is limited by only your headlamps, make it difficult. It’s unnerving and beautiful at the same time.

Dirt 5 is a racing event that can be either lap-based, point-to-point or point-to–point. But Dirt 5 offers events like Gymkhana as well as Path Finder. Path Finder takes you along a hilly route with narrow paths and rocky terrain. You are required to carefully navigate the course. The course was enjoyable but I did experience some frustration due to the terrain being uneven. Gymkhana is a stunt mode where you’re tasked with completing drifts, donuts, and jumps on your way to (hopefully) a high score. Each Gymkhana event was something I looked forward to, however the limited time and obstacles meant they fell flatter than any stunt-based mode.

In career mode, the events are arranged in meaningful ways. This allows you to plot your route through an ever-growing tree of events as you work your way towards becoming an offroad star. If I finish a South African race, it is possible to opt for Gymkhana events rather than traveling to Greece to take part in a challenging rally race. Apart from earning stamps based on performance that allow you to unlock chapters, there are optional objectives which can add variety to your events and help you get noticed by fellow racers. You can also challenge your rivals in one-on-one Throwdown races if you have completed enough.

Dirt 5’s career is fairly straightforward; there’s no vehicle customization outside of decals and paint jobs, but I loved replaying events to complete as many of the special objectives as possible. Most are actions I would probably do anyway, like trading paint with other racers, drifting a set number of times, or sustaining a minimum speed, but the “finish the race in reverse” objective always had me scratching my head.

Unfortunately, most modes outside of the career don’t give you enough incentive to stick around. While I might try to score a better time-trial score in the leaderboard, it is impossible to avoid the constant feeling of repeating myself. The custom races let you adjust everything down to how quick the weather changes, but these settings don’t make up for the lack of optional objectives, making the races feel less eventful than their career counterparts.

Because of this, I’ve found myself returning again and again to the community-driven custom course mode, Playgrounds. You can create your own track for Gymkhana or racing using intuitive tools. Then you can share it online. While you can’t make a huge course like the ones in other modes, you use gates, barriers, platforms, and obstacles to deliver fun experiences completely distinct to this mode. To find garish Gate Crasher courses filled with jumps and spirals, I enjoyed browsing the Discover tab. Even after I finished career mode, I regularly returned to Playgrounds’ community tab to check out the latest creations.

If you’d rather play with others, Dirt 5 supports local splitscreen with up to four players (even in career mode), as well as online play through traditional racing and party games like Vampire, a game of tag where you avoid the “infected” cars until the timer runs out, or King, an event where you try to capture a crown then hold onto it for as long as possible by avoiding others in the arena. My only way to meet people online was through matchmaking, which proved difficult for me. However, it did work out that I could find party games and competition with other players. This is disappointing given how young the game is.

Though some of the modes don’t provide the deepest experiences, I enjoyed my time racing around in Dirt 5 thanks to a fun career mode and a community section bustling with potential. Whether you’re earning your spot among the superstars or creating a vehicular obstacle course of your dreams, Dirt 5 is worthy of a spot on the podium.