It was particularly entertaining hearing the highly-recognisable voices of video game VO veterans Troy Baker and Nolan North regularly sniping at each other in the guise of two rival races. Hosted by Donut Media presenters James Pumphrey and Nolan Sykes, it’s a low-fi approach – no character models, no cutscenes – but even though the segments are entirely inessential I have to admit I bought into the silly back-and-forth and listened to every one of them. There’s even a light story woven throughout the career which unfolds exclusively in a series of in-game podcast snippets sprinkled between events as you progress.

With Dirt Rally 2.0 competently overseeing that department nowadays, Dirt 5’s career mode is now an arcade-oriented mosaic of mostly pack racing events across tracks in 10 global locations, including New York, Arizona, China, Norway, Brazil, Greece, South Africa, Morocco, Italy, and Nepal. There are certainly differences in the way a custom-built buggy tackles terrain compared to, say, a rear-wheel drive retro rally car (and there are also some subtle variations in grip across the different surface types – especially ice) but overall it’s a bit more basic and I found the handling quickly tameable.Gone, too, is Dirt 4’s custom rally stage generator tool, and with it, any regular point-to-point rallying at all, actually. Built on the bones of Codemasters Cheshire’s Onrush, Dirt 5 actually doesn’t feel anything like its direct predecessor, ditching its two-pronged “simulation” versus “gamer” approach to handling options for a single, easy-to-grasp driving model. Ironically enough, one key game Dirt 5 roundly ignores is Dirt 4. This cocktail of influences combines for a well-executed racer, albeit one that seems content to iterate rather than innovate. There’s even a touch of Trackmania’s custom track builder and some subtle hints of SEGA Rally Revo, RalliSport Challenge, and Gravel to boot. There’s a heavy handful of Dirt 2’s brashness, a dash of Dirt 3’s gymkhana mode, and a limited sprinkle of MotorStorm’s rough-and-ready brand of fender bending (Dirt 5 even features racing in Monument Valley, the location of the original MotorStorm). That said, Driveclub is far from the single influence on Dirt 5. This game handles night lighting and extreme weather with particular panache.

Like Driveclub, Dirt 5 is a mix of doorhandle-to-doorhandle arcade pack racing and bleeding-edge visuals.

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