DLC #205 - Dirt 5 - Wild Spirits

A final rev up into the world of Dirt 5. The culmination of 4 DLC packs adding a collective total of 102 new Career events has almost produced a breadth of content akin to playing through the entire game again.

The Wild Spirits pack is the final contribution to this, adding the last 25 events to grace the eventually enormous Career Mode. If you include the 125 Career events from the main game, the overall grand total reaches 227. That's a lot of Dirt.

The pack also adds 2 new cars, including the Bronco Wildtrak 2021 and the Prodrive Hunter. There are also 2 new track variations exclusively added for Stampede events - Ait Ojana and Tinghir bolstering the line-up of track variants for Morocco.

However, you won't encounter any new race types outside of those already added from prior DLC packs, and there is also an absence of any new race locations. It's exactly what you may have come expect by this point - A little variation between each content pack, but fundamentally just more Dirt.

The 5 additional trophies also follow the exact same logic as before - A consistency which has been maintained throughout.

The "That's the Spirit!" trophy, awarded for Earning all 75 stamps available in the Wild Spirits Career, is the primary goal yet again, and winning all 25 events is the only way to net every stamp for this trophy.

I've generally found the progression through these new batch of events for each content pack to be trouble free, with the odd difficulty spike here and there, and it could just be fatigue at this point, but I found this to be the most challenging pack to tackle when it came to those expected difficulty spikes. I spent 2 hours alone attempting to beat the only Sprint event in the Career path on Hard difficulty, with another Stampede event later on taking me almost an hour extra.

Considering I've completed these prior packs within 3-4 hours previously, this was a little surprising, but an obvious observation to note nonetheless.

The other trophies in the pack are still progression-based, and will be awarded for beating specific events you'll encounter on your way up towards earning all 75 stamps, and the final trophy is the customary milage accumulation trophy - The Prodrive Hunter the chosen vehicle on this occasion.

Oddly, this trophy didn't unlock once I'd surpassed 30 miles, and I actually had to breach the 40 mile mark before I saw it unlock. In similar fashion, I also didn't unlock the trophy for earning all 75 stamps instantly, and had to replay one of the very first Career events in order to trigger it. Nothing hugely detrimental to progress, but an odd situation to suddenly be experiencing glitched trophies after no such issues prior.

I have openly preached for the "more of the same" approach being a perfectly viable tactic for certain games before. However, Dirt 5 was a game that needed to bring something different to the table with it's DLC content after an underwhelming main game. A few new event types, vehicles and track variations just wasn't going to be enough to make up for an abject entry into the series. 

It was nice to jump back in briefly, but I also partly feel like I'm just saying that to be nice. The clear lack of intent to produce something different predictably wore thin quickly, and it feels like an opportunity missed for a game that desperately needed a chance to right a few wrongs. You don't just accidentally churn out 4 straight DLC packs consisting of the exact same content over and over.

Even the trophy tiles between each pack were exempt of any reasonable level of effort, which says it all.

DLC #204 - Dirt 5 - Uproar

A nod to Dirt Showdown - one of my favourite entries into the entire Dirt series.

However, as much as I love a throwback, it only ultimately served as a reminder to question why we never got a sequel to Dirt Showdown after all these years. Especially for a series that has been very much hit and miss ever since.

A familiar drill, but the injection of freshness from the Super Size pack is short lived here. The new events from that pack, which we discovered there for the first time, are (almost) all present here too, so it's no surprise you'll find some continuity, despite playing outside of sequential order.

However, Gatecrasher and Smash Attack are only represented once within the new batch of events, and Time Trial isn't even represented at all, so even though it seems the new event types were actually introduced as part of this pack, they're nowhere near fully capitalised on and criminally underused, especially compared to Super Size, where they're much better represented.

The pack also still lacks any new event locations or track variations. It suffers the same issue as the Energy pack. Just way too much copy and paste and ends up feeling like a lazy, artificially padded extension of the Career mode.

Uproar does add 4 new vehicles though - All of which are ripped straight from Dirt Showdown's catalogue.

There are also 5 new trophies added too, following on from the exact same theme as before. There are a batch of 25 new events to play through, and the "Dusk til Dawn" trophy, awarded for Earning all 75 Medals available in Uproar, will come through winning each of these 25 events. There's a seemingly random gimmick where all events take place within a night-time setting, for whatever reason, which is possibly where the name for that trophy is inspired from.

The remainder of the trophies are all earned through natural progression of the 25 events, outside of the usual ancillary trophy awarded for farming 30 miles out of a particular vehicle - The Duke Coupe Off Road Mod on this occasion. I'd already clocked 27 miles on this particular vehicle through the main game Career mode anyway, making this one much easier than expected.

Difficulty is still fairly consistent when measured up against prior experience. A handful of the events may take a few tries, and some are much easier than that. It shouldn't take more than 3-4 hours to beat them all though.

DLC #203 - Dirt 5 - Super Size

I've been so heavily wrapped up in Forza Horizon 5 recently, I almost completely forgot about the fact I'd began going through the Dirt 5 DLC.

I was fairly critical of the Energy pack for it's lack of new content, and whilst the Super Size pack doesn't exactly drastically alter the course of this, it at least made Dirt 5 feel a little bit fresher.

Since the Energy pack, and bearing in mind this is actually the third piece of DLC in the timeline, the game has finally included some new track variants and event types to tackle them on.

Time Trial, Gatecrasher and Smash Attack are all newly added event types. Time Trial has you racing ghost variants in an attempt to better their lap times. Gatecrasher has you negotiating a course through a set number of gates to the finish line. Smash Attack has you destroying a certain number of objects within an allotted amount of time. Simple but a much needed injection of freshness.

The package also adds 4 new "Super Sized" vehicles to race, as well as a few new tracks. There are 2 different variants in Brazil added and the Nevada arena is a completely new setting altogether.

There are 5 new trophies to tackle, and these follow the exact same path to progression as before.

The extension to the Career mode sees the addition of 27 new events. This is 2 more than any other pack, and contains a decent mix of the new elements mentioned above. The new event types are well represented across the 27 events, as well as a balanced array of the old favourites, and you'll also get your chance to race at the new track variants a few times too.

Progressing towards the "Main Course" trophy, awarded for Earning all 81 stamps available in Super Size career, is the main goal, and as before, stamps are simply awarded for winning races, with each event being designated 3 stamps for crossing the line in first place. You'll need to win the event to unlock all 3 stamps, and the variance in challenge feels exactly the same as it did in the Energy pack - Most events can be won fairly easily, with the odd one that may give a slightly greater degree of challenge.

You'll unlock the other trophies as you progress towards the main event, with the "Travelling in Style" trophy, awarded for Driving 30 miles in the Bentley Continental GT Ice Race Car, as the only outlier. You can actually use this vehicle in a few of the career Time Trial events, so it's easy to just repeatedly lap one of these until the trophy pops.

Full package completion is around 4-5 hours in length. Could be quicker if you're not precious about an artificially heightened challenge like myself, who opted to stick to the hard difficulty setting.