Dirt Showdown PS3 preview: Should Motorstorm be worried?

Inside Dirt 3, there were two games. One pitted you against the savage Finnish countryside in fully-licensed rally cars and demanded pinpoint powersliding; the other plonked you in Battersea powerstation, and just wanted you to make a mess.

To move the franchise forward, Codemasters are basically splitting the atom – Dirt Showdown isn’t Dirt 4, instead it takes Dirt 3′s light-hearted, tyre-smoking muckaround moments, and turns it all up to eleven.

Since I first saw the game last year, Dirt Showdown’s really gathered momentum. The bare bones of an easy to pick up racer were there from the start, since Dirt 3′s EGO engine and mega-user friendly handling model have been carried over to Showdown.

But it was only during my latest hands-on that Codemasters’ rock ‘n’ roll new racer gained its swagger – racing a bashed-up cop car against ambulances, school buses, dune buggies and hearses in the Nevada desert is a spectacle in itself, but racing them around a firework-filled figure-8 track designed for multi-car pile ups makes Showdown’s ethos instantly make sense – in producer Iain Smith’s words, “let’s just be ridiculous.”

My trusty patrol car survives the brawls through the first couple of corners, though it now resembles a Fiat 500 made of tin foil. I edge out into the lead and start to relax, just in time to completely misjudge one of the track’s crossovers and smash helplessly into a rusty van.

Dirt Showdown 8-ball racing gameplay

As I wrestle with my all but broken motor, I’m swallowed up by the pack and the battle for first starts again. Codemasters’ communications manager Adrian Lawton describes it as a “blue shell moment,” referring to Mario Kart’s first-to-last-to-first racing, and he’s right. There’s an engagingly thin line between winning a race and trailing in behind everyone.

There’s an art to creating that chaos though. The boost button’s a good example – you start with a full tank to use as you wish. Once it’s gone, you can recharge it by damaging opponents which means if you’ve taken the lead you won’t get that chance.

It keeps you from gaining an unattainable lead, but helps you regain the lead when it all goes wheels over windscreen (and it will, a lot). That kind of racing is but one of Showdown’s three distinct areas – speed style and destruction. The style events are your Ken Block-inspired gymkhana stunts, and the destruction element – well, take a guess.

1 of 2