Platinum Difficulty Rating - 3/10
It will always pain me to feel like I'm being overly critical of games within series that I've hugely advocated for in the past. I have 5 previous Dirt titles within my collection, all completed to 100% and it's still one of my favourite racing series of all time.
So it gives me no pleasure to declare that Dirt 5 is definitely a dip in form for the series. That can be taken as a positive inditement to the strength of the games that have come before it, but even looking at it from that perspective, there's just too much that misses with Dirt 5.
The biggest standout disappointment is the lack of content on offer. The Career mode is lengthy, and robust in terms of the volume of races, but it practically makes up the entirety of the game.
There's an Arcade and Time Trial mode for recreational free-racing, as well as an Online mode to fulfil the Multiplayer obligations, but there's just no depth and these modes are also practically completely excluded from the trophy list. Why is my only option within the public Online mode to instantly matchmake and end up being thrown into a completely random race? No event/car class preferences, no ability to set up my own public lobby with my own race parameters and settings, no ability to choose to play my favourite party game modes. Just completely restricted and devoid of choice.
The new Playgrounds mode allows users to create, share and play each others creations, and this is a nice touch if you're into this sort of thing. However, like all games that open their doors to user-generated content, you get the good, bad and the ugly, and once you've played a couple of tracks and realise there's nothing worth while awaiting your investment other than a spot on a couple of leaderboards, the novelty quickly wears off.
Even the Career mode, where you'll spend most of your time if you're gunning for the Platinum trophy, has it faults. The story is told through the recordings of a Podcast called Donut, with intermissions between events including soundbites from interviews between racers and personal ramblings from the hosts. The dialogue is just annoying and cringey, and I'd honestly just prefer a complete omission of it altogether.
There are still some positives though. The environments are vibrant, full of colour and excellently contrasted and the variety of terrains and weather conditions are perfectly captured. From the bi-polar sun-kissed, drenched rainforests of Brazil to the icy, rocky mountains of Norway - this has always been the most consistent strength of Dirt games, and really showcases the graphical capabilities of the console.
The gameplay will feel like it leans too far across towards an arcade vibe for some, but I've always felt like the Dirt games have favoured this option on the whole outside of Dirt Rally. It felt like the more technical aspects of racing simulation were reserved for the Rallying games in the series, and Dirt just allowed for that extra flexibility. I've never been a huge fan of heavy levels of customisation via vehicle tuning and modifications, and choosing colour schemes and liveries is about as detailed as customisation goes, which is fine by me.
There is a healthy selection of different vehicle types from different eras. Rally cars, Trucks, Buggies from the 80's, 90's and Modern day - It's a solid collection and they all they handle differently depending on their size, statistics and age. However, despite a few shining positives, it is the weakest entry into the Dirt series to date for me, just purely for how stripped back and shallow everything feels compared to before.
The step back even extends to the trophy list, with just 21 trophies on offer within the base game.
As mentioned, the trophy list is very heavily focused towards the Career mode, which sees you start your racing journey as a rookie under the tutelage of Alex Janicek (AJ). He is looking for you to progress to the very top and take down Bruno Durand, an untouchable, longstanding rival within the Motorsport community.
To do this, you'll need to progress through a series of different events, unlocking Showdowns against rivals, taking them down one by one until you reach Bruno Durand in the Grand Finale. It's a very familiar template that's been replicated in previous games in the series.
The "No Event Left Behind" trophy, awarded for Completing every Career Event will take you through practically the entirety of this whole list. Specifically, there are 125 events to get through, and the list does not require you to even win every event for the Platinum trophy. This has been a normal requirement in previous Dirt games, but to fulfil the obligation of this trophy, you merely just need to progress via collecting stamps.
There are 375 stamps to collect throughout the Career - 3 for each of the 125 events on offer. Stamp requirements are tied to the event objectives within the event, and these can be as simple as performing 10 overtakes or exceeding a certain speed limit at any point during the race. The more stamps you collect, the more events you'll open up and this is the key to reaching the end of the game. The game does not set an expectation of you to win and you can even re-roll event objectives until you see a list of objectives you're happy to tackle.
There aren't any difficulty sensitive trophies at play here either, and you can choose to play on more challenging difficulties if you wish, but I would question what the point is when the progress of the game is not determined by winning or losing. I played on hard, which is one level off from the toughest difficulty, and still found the game fairly trouble-free, but the lack of motivation to truly push myself due to the low-commitment nature of the trophy list made it difficult for me to see beyond this game as anything more than just an exercise of progression.
The AI is very passive too. Most drivers will behave like they're normal road-obeying users and even on the harder difficulty, there is a very distinct lack of aggression shown by the rest of the field. It just fits in line with the whole vibe of the game being an overly-casual experience with no real sense of drive to push you on to feel challenged in any way.
It really couldn't be much easier, and I do feel like the overall vibe of the game, right down to the trophy list, has been designed to make it as accessible to as many people as possible. I don't have an issue with this, but I also believe there should be a challenge to be sought for those who want it, and it doesn't even seem like you can do that.
The 125 events are well covered, with 8 different disciplines providing further variety across a range of different locations, track variations and vehicle classes. I just wish it promoted more of a challenge and I had 98% of all trophies unlocked by the time I had reached the end and finally unlocked this trophy, which put me just 1 trophy away from the Platinum. It wasn't too surprising, given the small size of the list, but it also evidences how heavily favourable this list is towards the Career mode and how you can practically beat the entire list through some light, natural progression.
There are a couple of trophies dedicated to actions within Playground mode and exploring vehicle customisation options, but this requires light dabbling at best, and barely worth mentioning. There are no trophies dedicated to the Arcade or Online portions of this game whatsoever. From a personal perspective, this is a huge disappointment for me because Dirt games have produced some fun journeys through online trophies in the past, and it's sad to see it neglected entirely for this instalment to the series.
As a consequence of this, there are no other notable trophies to mention - After all, why would there be when you can unlock 98% of the entire list through striving towards just a single trophy? There is a slight bit of deviation into other modes, but the majority of the the list is very progression-heavy, and you'll fulfil everything you need to by the time you beat that final event and conclude the journey. It's quite a rare occurrence to unlock so much of a list without even really having to think about it or plan ahead.
Even with my best attempts to artificially inflate the challenge by aiming to come first in each event, I still sit here and question whether or not I can justify this Platinum even being as high as 3/10 in difficulty. My save file clocks in at just over 47 hours, which makes it a reasonably lengthy game, and if nothing else, there is at least a respectable amount of legwork required to make it through to the end.
However, there are alot of combined elements that allow you to almost sleep-walk through this entire list. A lack of necessity to win races, underwhelming opposition, a high volume of purely progression-based trophies and a rigid trophy list that lacks depth. Despite having a chunky time-sink, it doesn't really break any boundaries elsewhere.
It does make for a really disappointing list, especially when you look back at previous Dirt games and their trophy lists, which always promoted extensive exploration of multiple game modes and encouraged a wider participation of the Online parts of the game, which is always where Dirt really excelled for me.
There is a part of me that believes they knew their extra-curricular modes outside of the Career were a bit too bare and dysfunctional, so they made a conscious decision to exclude them from the trophy list. As a result, it makes for a very easy Platinum, and Dirt 5 is not a bad game - It's just not forward progress for the series.
Notable Trophies -
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| No Event Left Behind - Complete every Career Event. |
Hardest Trophy -
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