Dirt Showdown is a driving game developed by Codemasters Southam. The player is a driver and the game involves racing in tournaments. Wins will earn you money which you can use to upgrade your cars and you’ll unlock new tournaments by doing well in races.
When I started playing, one of the first things I noticed was that you don’t use your mouse at all, you use the arrow buttons to go through the menu options. It was clearly made for a console before it was developed for a pc and not much time was spent transferring it to pc properly. The interface therefore could have been better.
I liked the game in general. The races and tournaments have slightly different gameplay. In some rounds it’s traditional racing around a track and in others the aim is to earn points by damaging your opponents cars. What makes the latter difficult is that you still have a damage bar to keep an eye on, it makes it hard to do damage without getting killed but when you dies you respawn at the start of the track so it’s not a huge setback.
The controls aren’t too hard to use, the arrow keys control the direction of the car and my major hindrance with driving games is my ability to spin wildly out of control and bump into everything but the driving is smooth and the keys aren’t overly sensitive. This is good because despite the difficulty level, it can be frustrating if you can barely get a car to drive in a straight line.
I started playing on a medium difficulty level and soon switched to easy because I found it very difficult to progress through the tournaments. You have to place in the top three to advance to the next level and even on easy it took me a few goes. This could differ depending on how much experience you have with driving games though.
I liked the graphics and the music playing through the tournaments. The soundtrack is all rock music which suits the crash up derby and fast racing style of the game. I think it could also be a fun game to play on multiplayer although I didn’t get to try this out.
I thought it was a fun game. The driving controls are quite nice and not overly sensitive to the slightest tap which can get very frustrating. I enjoyed it lots although I found it hard to progress and found myself having to redo levels. The rounds where the aim is to cause damage to other cars are good fun, one was quite difficult because you’re on a raised platform which you can very easily fall off and spend a lot of time driving back onto it.
All in all, I thought it was a fun , enjoyable game. There were a few downsides, the game was clearly adapted from a console platform and not much consideration was given to how the game could be played with a keyboard and mouse. It seemed quite hard to progress through the levels. I liked the atmosphere of the game, it was exciting and the music really gives it a nice feel. All things considered, a good game.
Disclaimer: All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game
Buy from Amazon for Wii, PS3, 3DS or XBox 360
