As far as racing series go, I tend to stay away from the technical racers, they have a sub-system in play that never clicked with me, full realistic I can get behind, but arcade is where I love to play. Dirt as a series has been evolving over the years, going from a full-on technical racer to more of an arcade experience and now that Dirt 5 is here, they have managed to merge the two in some pretty surprising ways. The question is, will this change to a long running series appeal to more gamers?

There is a bit of a story in Dirt 5, though you are not directly involved with it, instead you are a new rookie, hitting up the Dirt series for the first time, your self-appointed mentor AJ, has decided you have what it takes to be the best and he is going to support you. The story is mostly played out while you are in the career menu, looking at what event to take part in and is done via the Dirt Podcast, which is hosted by James Pumphrey and Nolan Sykes, both real world racing and podcast folks. As you progress through the career mode, you get to hear more of these episodes and as such more of the story, from interviews with other racers, to some smack talk between AJ and the hotshot racer Bruno Durand. Like I said, you are not involved in this, there is no choose your own adventure style options here, you are just a listener to the events taking place around you and that is fine, because it works.

As for the racing, there are a few modes, Career, which I mentioned above, quick race, online and playgrounds and each offers something a little different, well except for career and quick race, those are mostly the same. Online was something I only managed to test the once, as the game was not out until now, so while it worked once it connected, the amount of time it took to find a game was high, due to lack of players, so I would expect it to be a lot smooth now. Playgrounds though, that was a fun option, here you can download, or at least once there are some, courses made by other racers, or put on your design hat and create your own course. The courses can be anything, trick, point to point or a combination, you can through in walls for obstacles or direction, jumps, ramps and more, but more on that later. The career is likely where you will spend the bulk of your time and for good reason, it gives the reasons to push forward and as I said, gives you a story to enjoy as well. Apart from the main racing, more below for that, there are also throwdown events to take part in, when they are unlocked and how they are unlocked is anyone’s guess, but these are choice events, against a specific racer, just for you.

The career starts off with you in the ignition class, the lowest tier of racing that they offer and as you complete races and earn tokens, you unlock new groups. Each group allows for you to pick your path, so you are not stuck following the same path as everyone else, this is doubly awesome, because it means you can pick your racing disciplines you want to take part in, or in my case ignore. There are a host of racing options from a more traditional rally, where you race along a very long course, to Gymkhana events and even Sprint Cars; and with each taking place in one of a dozen locations, there is a lot to see and do. The problem is not all the race types will gel with everyone, for example Sprint Cars, well it sucks, the entire thing is about going left, left and a little bit of left, which they even make fun of when they introduce it, but as you have to be able to modulate the acceleration you put down, in order to avoid going the bad kind of sideways, it just didn’t work for me. Others were far more appealing, especially once I started to understand the tracks.

Now coming first in a race is not needed to push forward, though it helps a lot, no, what you need to do is complete three in race objectives, they can be as simple as trading paint with 7 other cars in a race, to getting 30 seconds of time in the air. Some of them though can be quite devious and depending on where you sit in the pack, impossible to hit, like getting 10 overtakes, if you start at the back of the pack, there is a very simple thing to achieve, takes time, but doable. There were times though, when the game would put me in pole and ask me to overtake folks, but when you start in first, that is kind of hard to do, even more so when they say you have to drift while doing it. The combination of things you need to do, can be a fun diversion from just plain racing and I really did like trying to hit them all, but some of them really need to be considered again, because they just don’t work well enough. The reason why you need these objectives done is for each you can earn a token, you also get them for coming first and so on, with three possible ones per race available. In order to unlock the final race, or at least the one in your chosen path, you need a set number of tokens, so if you are short a few, you had best get back and try to earn some more. Outside of the race objectives, there are also sponsor objectives to consider, with dozens of them to choose from, each will task you with some challenges, like get 5 poles in a season, or overtake twice while in the air, that helps boost your rep, which gives you more things to personalise yourself with.

The races take place in a dozen or so locations, from the hills of Greece to the snowy mountain top of Nepal and beyond and each has a unique look and feel to it, unless its dark and rainy and then they all look the same. I kid on that, that is because it just becomes to dark to see much of anything, but outside of that, they all look unique and fun and provide some great scenery to race through, but there are some problems with them. The first isn’t a problem so much as it was a conscious design choice and that is that the edges of a lot of the tracks are not protected by barriers and such, so rocks, trees and other obstacles will be things you need to avoid. There were a number of times, I thought I had a nice line, only to realise just before I hit something, that I was about to hit an exposed element of the location, it is something to always be aware of.

The other issue happens when things get dark and I don’t just mean racing at night, I mean dark, because the game can change from bright and sunny to overcast and rainy in the course of a single lap. The issue is when the sun dips behind clouds, mountains or other such item, the game goes very dark and it isn’t just a design thing, it’s like the game doesn’t understand the subtleness that it needed to hit and as such it just goes from one extreme to the other. One minor issue I have is racing at night, not the racing itself, that is still delightful, but some courses, China and Greece come to mind, have a lot of lights that dot the tracks, from the ones at the side, to those overhead as decoration. The game doesn’t keep them, turned on, for lack of a better term, until you get near it, the problem is you will see them coming on all the time and it can be quite distracting. The game does support, at least on Xbox One X a choice between Visual and Performance mode and no matter the choice, the issue still happened, which is a shame.

With the presentation overall, there were a few things I liked, and a few things I didn’t but lets start with the good, the menus are clean and simple to navigate, which is good, even when you start unlocking dozens of stickers, lanyards and more, navigating is pretty straight forward. As I said at the start, you do get to hear the Dirt Podcast a lot and that is honestly really well done, especially as it could have easily come off as very forced. The two hosts are voiced by real life podcasters from Donut Media, but the script was brought to life with the direction of Nolan North and Troy Baker, these two guys again, am I right. The big thing is that Troy also voices AJ, so you get to hear him a lot and AJ is a nice calm voice and even when you do something silly like bash into everyone on the track, the voice is never angry at you. Nolan on the other hand voices Bruno and it is quite fun to hear the man be the bad guy and while not evil bad, more douche bad, it is still a fun little change up for him. While I would have expected two real life guys to struggle against two veteran actors, they all come together and it is honestly brilliant.

Another something that falls into the previous classification of brilliant is the games soundtrack, normally racing games feature a soundtrack that is one-part popular song and three parts random things people haven’t heard of. While this still sticks close to the same formula, the songs they have chosen are good and while I couldn’t tell you the name of them, which is one of the bads, they are decent and fun to listen to, no matter if you are in menu or racing. One final nice touch is that when you are looking at you cars, you can actually inspect the cars, now this is not Forza level of inspection, but you can open the doors and spin around it, which is a nice touch.

With all the good though, comes the bad and there are a few things here to be aware of, like I said earlier the visuals are a bit spotty at times, with things popping in, but apart from that, mostly they are solid. I say mostly, because on key and very important area feels like it was phoned in and that is the crowds, they are generic at the best, pathetic at the worst and they never do anything. There are a few animation cycles where the crows will cheer, or at least a few of them do, but other than that, they do nothing and if you want to see for yourself, use the games photo mode, which is nice, to look at them, they just stand there. There were times, when I was be going slow in a hill climb event where folks with cameras at the side of the road, would be looking in the opposite direction to where I was, a single car event and they are not looking at the car, a simple fix would make that feel better.

On the audio side, like I said earlier there is no way of knowing what song is playing as the game has not prompt to tell you, so unless you break out your phone to shazam it or, you just happen to know the lyrics to it, you are going to be left wondering. The other audio issue that needs to be addressed, let me go back and listen to the Dirt Podcast episodes I either skipped or want to relisten to, you can pause them while they are playing, by clicking in the left stick, but you can’t go and listen to them whenever you want and it’s just annoying.

Dirt 5 is a game that the more I saw of it, the more I wanted it, from the number of racing types to the variety of locations, there was always something new and fun to do. The career is pretty linear, but it does provide a sense of choice and while your intended path might lead you to a series of events that are not that fun, looking at you Sprint, there is no reason to force yourself into them. There are some odd choices in design, not having song names appear on screen, or a crowd that is barely animated, but when you get into the racing, it is just fun and pure and more to the point, easily accessible and that was what I was hoping for.