I am an old man! There was a point in these sports (extreme or otherwise) games: FIFA, Burnout, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, etc., where I could name a majority of the music in the game’s licensed soundtrack. However, in Dirt 5‘s soundtrack, all I can find enjoyable is three songs. I’m probably a bit too old for the target demographic of that game. It is not a bad achievement for a 23-year-old with the heart of 1000-year-old alien from Gallifrey.

Part of and wholly separate to that all at the same time, the release of Dirt 5 makes for the 14th release in the Colin McRae Rally/Dirt series that started back on the PS1. Most of us that are crusty enough to remember when Colin McRae was alive and jockeying for top positions with Carlos Sainz Sr. (dad of F1‘s Carlos Sainz Jr.), will probably be most fond of the mid-2000 release of Colin McRae Rally 2.0. Those of you with more familiarity with the more recent installments would know DiRT 4 was an edge of your seat and somewhat serious rally racer. It showed its McRae series roots from the nearly two decades prior.

Dirt 5, or DIRT5 as it likes to be stylized, is none of that. It is a brash, colorful, loud, and downright mental teenage rebellion of drug-taking lands us on the doorstep of pure arcade racing. Out with the FIA, and in with the swear word that my editor would beat me over the head with until it hurt. It is fun, outlandish, filled with music 20-somethings listen to (probably?) and aimed square at the reality TV/online game show audience. It features a narrative told through a podcast following the competition that your career follows. Wouldn’t you know it? The Dumb and Dumber of video game voice-overs are leading the cast of your rival and mentor, Nolan North and Troy Baker.

I’ll cut straight through the tape here: I don’t care for the podcast follow-along thing going on. I’m not jumping for joy about most of it, with the rest of the cast mostly being James Pumphrey and Nolan Sykes. In fact, I thought those names were made specifically for the game until I looked them up. The entire cast takes unrefined blind shots at the word humor without looking it up in a dictionary beforehand, and it is an elongated bad sketch played out by actors you don’t really care for in the first place. I hate to say it, but it is not made much better with W Series champion Jamie Chadwick’s slightly awkward celebrity special-guest role either; even though I adore her.

For the most part, you can just ignore it. Instead you can focus entirely on racing without the extra faff. As my lead-in suggests, it is a colorful, bright, and arcadey departure of the serious rallying you’d expect with such a series. Though, unlike let’s say, Project Cars 3, there is a sense of fun breaking through the otherwise outlandish and over-the-top nature of its packaging. 

It has a refined Codemasters handling system, and is an improvement of the preview build from the other week. Crossed with the crashing, brash, and spinning out of competitors akin arcade racing series Burnout and Wreckfest; It is still the edge of your seat racing with opportune moments of pulling the handbrake to throw the car around a corner. That said, the Sprint races can get right in the bin, the unwieldy and erratic nonsense that is. It is like playing Mario Kart on a banana peel circuit.

The question I’m sure some have, given that the game is a cross-gen release, is about the performance. The performance difference between generations is meant to be countered with Codemasters featuring two graphical modes. There is one which favors frame rates, and one which values graphical fidelity over all else. In both modes, the in-game action isn’t dramatically changing on 8th generation consoles. There are noticeably crisper details at a short distance when the preference of graphics is chosen, and that is the biggest difference.

That said, it wouldn’t be Dirt 5 and me playing it if I didn’t note how I broke it immediately. The photo mode that just gives car nerds the chance to get their smutty shots of the underside of cars is fantastic, until I broke it out of the box. At the time of writing, Codemasters has been notified and a PR spokesperson stated, “this is a known issue, and a fix is planned to be included within the next Xbox update [Codemasters] push live.” In the current build, playing in the performance-boosting mode can result in graphical glitches and crashes upon exiting the photo mode. I attempted this several times before checking the graphical enhancement mode, which works as intended.

Yes, we have another beautiful photo mode in a Codemasters game with cars, and you can get all the car-based smut shots you like. Even with my amateur hand at capturing just the right moment, lighting, and the perfect everything, some shots look great. I’m always a fan of a good photo mode in a game, and Dirt 5 didn’t let me down. In fact, some of my favorites were captured quite quickly. I would like the ability to be more refined with the movement of the camera, though overall, framing a shot isn’t too hard as it is.

Though, for all the glee of racing and photo modes that I have, I’m still not jumping at the addition of the Gymkhana events or the Playground mode. Those additions are the two most bombastic and colorful additions in the breakaway from McRae. The former is a “stunt” mode based around doing donuts and basic stunt car moves around colorful poles like an angry growling morris dancer. The latter is a mode for player-created levels in the same colorful vain in predetermined flat-ground locations; it is the collection of floating GTA Online-like scattered messes of nonsensical rubbish.

Overall, Dirt 5 is a departure of Codemasters’  attempt at taking on the off-road racing scene with grim sobriety and heading into a colorful arcade world. It is still accessible, and puts you in the driver’s seat but you’ll only need the edge of it. Dirt 5 is fun, exciting, and colorful, with an at times jaw-dropping photo mode. It provides simple pick-up-and-play gameplay when you are in the mood for a bit of side-by-side drifting for first, second, or third position on ice, dirt, or some gravel.

An Xbox One Review copy of Dirt 5 – Amplified Edition was provided by Codemasters for the purpose of this review.

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DIRT5

$59.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Fun sliding into corners arcade racing.
• A fantastic photo mode.

Cons

• A star-studded cast that doesn't add much.
• The podcast telling the story in the career mode is excruciating.