PREVIEW: Impressions of the Dirt Showdown Demo

Saga of the iconic driving video game, from Codemasters, which this time delivers more arcade style racing than the rest of the franchise rallies, with modes such as Yincana or destruction derby mode, and many more.

DiRT Showdown Cheats

Coming soon

The Dirt saga of Codemasters abandons rally competitions to focus on closed circuit racing in this new release. Dirt Showdown has passed to the dark side of arcade racing and neglects the simulation style that the series is known for. Now, aside from winning, you have to survive and pass others and if we cannot we can tear apart some of our rivals, for the better. As we have seen proven in this short demo.

After installing the demo, either on PC via Steam, Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network, we are given control of the first race. We see some menus that are falling from the sky as we move and choose options, so we headed to the only option “8 Ball”. This is a figure-8 circuit located at the foot of the famous bridge in San Francisco. As with the circuit can only choose a vehicle to compete, although we see that very soon we would be able unlock a new, multiplayer game mode “Rampage”.

After choosing the car we get to choose our exterior design and we have to burn tires and smash cars. If we look closely at this screen here comes the first surprise, for we see that we can buy upgrades for your car in one of three sections: power, resistance and management. Start the race we see that the opponents have green bars located that indicate their level of life. This will change color according when decreasing on the go, as will happen with our lives, whose level is visible at the top of a circle located at the bottom right of your screen. Just below shows the level of nitro or turbo that we have available and we can see it running out as we use it.

The engine “Evo” makes everything flow seamlessly on Xbox 360 and PS3 (so far I have not tried the PC version). The race takes place without any visual slowing down while several cars collide on the track and the two intense minutes that can play, the race goes by quick. To be able to achieve first position is complicated due to the turbo that will be automatically be recharged slowly or fills a little more when we hit a car, but we must be careful with our driving as if we could break our car fast early at the start of the race because they do not have the famous “reverse” in the Dirt sereies. The vehicle handling is not complicated and will have only two views (front and exterior) to watch the race. I find those to be few,  and I hope that in the final version of the game we have at least some more available.

After the race you can get money according to our position as I mentioned earlier that we can use that to improve any of the available vehicles. And so, after sending a challenge to a friend we can unlock the multiplayer race and new cars. ”Rampage” is more like Destruction Derby, all against all in one level where we have to get through hitting each other to score points against the other rivals. Especially important is the way we hit other cars, destroying them is super important to win. Nothing personal guys.

As usual in the Dirt multiplayer series we can get more fans in our final classification.This allows us to level up in multiplayer and in the early days we had players with level 9 already!

The demo, is short but intense, has left me wanting more, really. Maybe they should include an extra mode it would not haven been too much and would have calmed my fears by having the final game. Dirt Showdown offer precisely what parts are in the demo. Events such as short loops in which our driving skills will be essential to survive and try to end up being first. Dirt purists will disagree with the way the series has gone on this version, even those who like to smash cars to see Burnout game through different eyes. I particularly prefer the latter.