DiRT Showdown

My Saturday night co-op radar lit up the moment I saw DiRT Showdown's event list: Demolition arenas, 8-Ball cross-track races, Hoonigan gymkhana, Domination sectors, Hard Target survival runs, and a Party mode with capture-the-flag (Transporter) and loot-holdout (Smash and Grab) variants. That is a genuinely unusual breadth for a racing game, and Codemasters built it all around one core philosophy: contact is not just allowed, it is the point. Cars come fitted with health bars and a rechargeable boost for ramming opponents into barriers, and the fictional derby machines are designed to crumple satisfyingly, doors flinging, bumpers folding, slow-motion crash cameras punctuating the carnage. On easy-to-medium difficulty the handling is forgiving enough that a newcomer with a gamepad can be competitive in minutes, which is exactly what you want when there are four people on the couch and two of them last played a racing game in 2008. Split-screen is confirmed, and the local multiplayer is where the game makes its best argument for itself. The quick event format helps here: most rounds clock in under three minutes, so rounds rotate fast and nobody is stuck watching someone else play for ten minutes between goes. The Demolition modes in particular are a natural fit for groups, since rubber-banding AI keeps everyone in proximity and a lucky T-bone from the last-place car can torpedo the leader at any moment. For the solo player, the Joyride free-roam areas offer gymkhana-style trick missions and hidden collectibles as a lower-pressure alternative to the Tour campaign, and the Racenet challenge system lets you fire off timed runs at friends' scores asynchronously. Here is where honesty requires some caveats, though. The car roster leans heavily fictional and stays fairly shallow once you factor in that upgrades mostly level the field rather than open meaningful build variety. Track and venue count is limited, and reviewers at launch broadly agreed the single-player Tour runs dry in roughly four to six hours before repetition sets in. The campaign itself locks progression behind podium finishes with no choice of event order, so if a specific Hoonigan skill-check is blocking you, there is no going around it. The commentator is relentlessly cheesy and the in-event UI can clutter the screen with "DOMINATED" banners right as a tight corner arrives. These are real friction points. One critical note for anyone buying in 2026: Codemasters shut down the online servers for DiRT Showdown in March 2026, which removes the eight-player online modes entirely. The Party modes (Transporter, Smash and Grab, Speed Skirmish) are multiplayer-only and would have been online-only on PC, so what remains is local split-screen, the single-player Tour, Joyride, and asynchronous Racenet challenges. That is a meaningful chunk of the original content gone. If you were banking on online lobbies, this is a different product than it was at launch. For couch sessions with friends it still holds up well enough, but the solo experience will feel thin fast. As a party racer for casual players who think Mario Kart is too tame but iRacing is too serious, DiRT Showdown hits a real sweet spot. Rally purists should go find DiRT Rally instead. But bring three friends, assign the biggest car to the least coordinated person in the room, and the Demolition arena will do the rest.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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