DiRT Showdown Review

The latest creation to date from the renowned studio Codemasters has sparked heated debates among racing fans. Some disliked the arcade style and excessive simplification of everything, others found the two-minute boring races and lags in multiplayer off-putting. It can only be said that everyone is right in their own way: DiRT Showdown has too many controversial aspects.

It was hard to imagine that Codemasters would stoop so low, but games like DiRT Showdown are usually churned out by little-known studios in two weeks. Apparently, everyone at Codemasters is busy developing GRID 2, since a project like DiRT Showdown only needs two and a half developers. See for yourself: Showdown only nominally belongs to the Dirt series, offering an extremely simplistic take on arcade racing. After the fairly successful DiRT 2/3, announcing a game where you’re required to ram, ram, and ram your opponents again can only be described as tyranny. And it would still be bearable if not for the boredom that takes over in multiplayer, not to mention the dreary single-player campaign.

The game looked great and fun only in the trailers. In reality, it was simplified so much that it’s noticeable from the very first to the very last race. There are no proper tracks in the game; there are only platforms for "derby" and round, ball-shaped circuits for "races." The competitive mode is also gone (the game is way too easy), as is proper car handling (and the cars themselves feel slapped together).

All you’re required to do is smash your opponents’ cars as quickly as possible and protect your own car from hits for as long as you can. As for other modes, I can recall just a couple of "Gymkhana" runs and a few extremely simple circuit races. Unfortunately, each race rarely lasts more than two or three minutes... my game menu, with all the RaceNet and Steam social systems, takes longer to load! So what does that mean—I spend more time fiddling with menus than actually playing?!

The controls in the game are just insane, and it’s hard to steer not only with a keyboard, but even with a gamepad. If you turn the wheel at the wrong place or time, you’ll immediately go into a deep skid or spin in place until you come to a complete stop. There isn’t even a brake pedal in the game (right, who needs it), nor an acceleration pedal. All the cars drive at pretty much the same speed, regardless of their real-life specs. All that’s left is to use "nitrous oxide" to go faster and let off the gas to go slower. That’s what the controls are like in this game...

The multiplayer mode is boring, but still better than the single-player. At least with real people there’s some element of surprise, while you can catch the AI bots on every mistake. However, multiplayer suffers from another problem: there are almost no players. And if you’re lucky enough to gather a quorum, after about fifteen minutes of bumping into each other, everyone leaves to play something more interesting. The option to send a race recording to a friend or upload it to YouTube doesn’t inspire enthusiasm either. The reason is simple: there’s nothing to show, because the videos have no excitement or adrenaline—just a bunch of repetitive collisions.

The graphics in the game clearly don’t match the level stated in the system requirements. There’s no image clarity—everything is blurry and washed out, effects and collision rendering are on par with games from five years ago, and there are no HD textures or anti-aliasing. The developers apparently scrapped all this so consoles could handle the game. But why did they optimize the game only for AMD graphics cards? They only made things worse, since on systems with Nvidia cards the game is terribly buggy and takes forever to load.

Dirt: Showdown leaves you with only one question: "What did we pay our money for?" Turns out, it was for lousy controls, outdated graphics, boring gameplay in both single-player and multiplayer modes, and even calling Showdown a racing arcade game is a stretch. There are no proper tracks or races, character progression is pointless, and the cars are nothing but beaten-up junk.