I still have my PlayStation 3 connected, specifically to play MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, and of course I went back to it after playing Dirt 5 for a few hours. Find the right one for you, and win.Īll of this takes me back to Pacific Rift, which I think was my first video game review, and I was happy to give it high marks. But vehicles are rated according to the event you’re about to enter, and that’s it. I know I’d lengthen the gear ratio on everything if given the opportunity. Some race types can be avoided (I’m ass at gymkhana, and since I drive without traction control, the sprint cars, too), but it means replaying and acing the parts you’re really good at.ĭirt 5 puts A-list acting in the driver’s seatĪs an arcade racer, of course you can forget about tuning and setting up the vehicle - this may be where core rally drivers are really off-put. The career mode, which features the voice acting of Troy Baker and Nolan North, conforms to MotorStorm’s progression, too: Events are gated by the number of stamps you’ve earned. Naturally, Codemasters Cheshire puts it on mixed-surface events, just to make things interesting. When braking, you really have to plan ahead, like a day or two. It’s got F1-level straight-line speed on dirt, and the handling of a battleship on pavement. Folks, the WS Auto Racing Titan is a MotorStorm vehicle for sure. There’s even this, a big-and-stupid specialty vehicle that looks like a front-end loader bred to Galoob’s The Animal. But that was MotorStorm for you, all-out haul-ass action around a no-way-in-hell setting. My favorite, Marmifera Valley in Italy, wends through the support arches of a towering aqueduct (Foci di Giova races beside the excavation of some ancient ruin.) I seriously doubt a real-life racing series would get permission from an antiquities commission, much less environmental regulators, for that one. You can tell the designers had a lot of fun building out all of these settings. There’s even a trip out to Monument Valley, the setting of the first MotorStorm. The themed locales are also pure MotorStorm. Pacific Rift made great use of severe elevation changes, particularly to add suspense to the course and deliver the sense of blasting into the unknown, even if you’d memorized the layout. I saw MotorStorm most in Dirt 5’s uphill sections, most of which are at a stupefying grade you’d simply never find in real life. It’s sort of an off-road Neapolitan: Dirt Rally 2.0 for the chocolate Dirt 4 the vanilla and Dirt 5 is your strawberry, brightly colored and very sweet. Taken together, however, I think they’re a library of three titles serving distinct needs and interests, and just as playable today as the day they launched. And that game was a response to the more mass-market Dirt 4, which feathered in accessibility concessions and appeal to its core rallying feature set. The arcade/action tack the series has taken is a sharp turn away from the tough rallying sim they got in Dirt Rally 2.0. The demanding Dirt audience is somewhat divided, though, and I can understand it. If Dirt 5 is an homage to Evolution’s best work, then it’s a beautiful one. Oh yeah, that waterfall of sparks up ahead is MotorStorm as hell. Two Evolution developers - albeit DriveClub alumni, not MotorStorm - are among the senior design credits. Codemasters absorbed Evolution in early 2016 after Sony announced plans to close it down. Like I said, it’s just the feeling of being back in MotorStorm, a festival-type, arcade racing experience I’ve been badly missing.Īnd it makes sense: Codemasters Cheshire, the developers for this entry in the series, is the descendant of MotorStorm maker Evolution Studios. And these comparisons are by no means dead-on matches. Sure, there’s no nitrous boost, nor any shortcuts on the course. And then scrambling uphill over the loose rock strewn around Foci di Giova in Dirt 5, and sweeping an ultra-long right at full throttle absolutely felt like peeling around the crater’s rim on Pacific Rift’s Caldera Ridge. Lion’s Head also has a fork in the trail that spits you into an immediate hard left, which made me think of a terrible bottleneck in Mudslide, also from Pacific Rift. But there is a steep uphill right turn on Dirt 5’s Lion’s Head course that gave me mind’s-eye recollections of Razorback, a great run in Pacific Rift. Sure, the pre-race countdown (a succession of closeups) is a straight lift from the PlayStation 3’s MotorStorm: Pacific Rift - one of my all-time favorite racers. Dirt 5 is the only video game to give me the sense of place in another video game: MotorStorm. Video games often strive to give the player a sense of place for somewhere in real life.
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