2165: Dirt Showdown and Vulgar Racing

I am a fan of what I described to my friend Alex yesterday as “the vulgar side of racing games”. This is a pretentious way of saying that I’m a fan of arcade racers more than more realistic fare, but it kind of goes a little deeper than that: I’m a fan of racing games that firmly put an emphasis on fun and spectacle as opposed to providing a faintly plausible virtual driving experience.

Codemasters’ Dirt Showdown, which I picked up in the Steam Halloween sale, pushes all of my buttons in this regard.

Dirt Showdown is the very essence of vulgar racing. It’s loud, it’s brash, it’s very American (despite the Codies being British), it’s full of scrappy-looking cars that you’d expect to find burnt out in a council estate in Croydon… and it’s a ton of fun.

A lot of Dirt Showdown’s fun factor comes from its hyperactive nature — and this is true both within single events, all of which are chaotic and specifically set up to encourage full-contact racing, and within the game structure as a whole. The single-player campaign sees you flip-flopping from one discipline to another — one minute you’ll be racing, the next you’ll be smashing your way around a course made up of barriers, the one after that you’ll be trying to knock all of your opponents off a raised platform — and multiplayer is much the same, with the added chaos of some rather “sport-like” competitive games modelled on Capture the Flag and Halo’s Oddball mode.

You’re never stuck doing the same thing for very long, in other words, and this is what keeps the game interesting. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you setting the multiplayer mode to do nothing but races, but where’s the fun in that? The beauty of Dirt Showdown is that it encourages you to master flinging your car around with a variety of different goals in mind, be it dispatching opponents as quickly as possible, or simply beating them to the finish line.

The big appeal element in Dirt Showdown for me, though, is the fact that it’s an honest-to-goodness arcade racer. This is not a game intended to be taken seriously or be regarded as a sim; it’s not a game where you can admire lovingly detailed cockpit views; it’s a game about taking a hunk of junk (or, indeed, a few licensed rally cars) and then hurling it at a bunch of other hunks of junk and seeing who comes out on top. It’s a game about tapping the handbrake rather than using the actual brake to go around corners; it’s a game that features races specifically designed to encourage pileups. I approve of all of this.

Plus it’s super-cheap in the currently running Steam sale. So if you haven’t given it a shot yet — assuming you’re a racing game person — be sure to check it out.