DIRT 5

My Saturday night test for any racing game is simple: hand three friends a controller, crack something cold, and see if anyone is still smiling twenty minutes later. DIRT 5 passes that test with room to spare, even if it stumbles when you ask it to be anything more than gloriously loud party fuel. Codemasters made a deliberate choice here to strip out the rally-sim DNA that DIRT Rally 2.0 built up so carefully and replace it with something closer to an arcade cabinet from 2003. The handling model is forgiving to the point of being almost too easy - pull the handbrake through a mud-swept turn, point the car where you want it, and the physics will more or less cooperate. Wheel peripheral owners should know upfront that a gamepad is genuinely the better input device here; wheel support was added post-launch via a patch update, but the handling was never designed around it. If you own a nice steering wheel rig, this is not the game that justifies setting it up. Grab a controller instead and lean into it. The event variety is wider than you might expect. Career mode takes you across locations including Brazil, China, Norway, Morocco, and a frozen Roosevelt Island in New York, each with their own visual personality. Beyond standard circuit races, you get Rally Raid (point-to-point stages), Path Finder (rocky terrain traversal that occasionally launches your vehicle into a comedic flip), Gymkhana (stunt scoring with a ticking clock), and wilder online modes like Vampire and Transporter that feel ripped from a party game. The Playgrounds mode lets you build and share arena-based tracks, and the community content adds a decent tail of replayability once the roughly 10-hour career wraps up. Online matches support up to 12 players, and - here is the headline stat for couch gaming - split-screen supports up to four players locally across all modes including Career. That is genuinely rare for a non-kart racing game on PC, and it is the strongest argument for owning this one. The criticisms that landed at launch still stand. The solo career feels thin once the novelty of the locations wears off; event types blur into each other and the AI difficulty rarely punishes sloppy driving. Critics at the time pointed out that dirt and snow have almost no meaningful effect on car behaviour - only ice actually forces you to adjust. The Gymkhana events in particular suffer from a handling model that lacks the precision that mode demands. The game looks spectacular, with dynamic weather systems that genuinely change the look and feel of each venue, but underneath the visual flair the depth just is not there for long sessions alone. For the right crowd, none of that matters much. If you want a sim, DIRT Rally 2.0 is right there. DIRT 5 is for everyone else: the friend group that wants four-way split-screen carnage on a Friday, the casual racer who finds most racing games intimidating, or anyone who just wants to jump a Dakar truck off a Norwegian hillside without reading a manual first.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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