Dirt 5 is an arcade like racing game with roots in Sega Rally. The focus is driving fast with your car, through all kinds of weather and mud, with the goal of getting first over the finish line.
The game focuses on fun. I turned down the difficulty setting to easy, and found it manageable and rewarding when I won the races. The game wasn’t overly technical and it is easy to just pickup and drive a couple of laps.
Sometimes the game focuses too much on the fun. I do not enjoy the truck racing, where you drive some kind of lift around in a circle. I also didn’t enjoy the path finder track, where you try to find a way over mountains where there are no real roads.
What I like most are the rally-like experiences, where you drive from point A to point B, instead of going round and round in laps. The only thing I’m missing is a navigator that would yell “haaard right” in my ear. That would bring back some good memories from Lombard Rac Rally on the Amiga.
The career mode is long, and not in a good way. You drive the same tracks over and over, with very little variation. Sometimes it’s at night (hate that). Sometimes it’s in snowfall. But it is the same maps over and over. It’s good in a way, because you learn the tracks and become better at them, but still I would enjoy a little bit more variation or just a shorter career mode.
The game have some kind of story, told through a podcast, which I think is just superfluous. After completing all the tracks, you get some kind of outro “good work” and then the credits roll. I think they could just skip all that.
We played some couch coop, which is fun in its own way, but the game is hard enough when you have the full screen, and extra hard when you only have half the screen to look at.
In summary, I enjoyed this game but I’m also glad that I’m done with it.
I rate this game as GOOD.
Replay 