Recent reviews by BlastingCitter

EDIT: it will include their trash ass kernel-level anticheat starting from next month. So if you bought the game and enjoyed it on linux, well, ♥♥♥♥ you! And there's quite a few bunch of linux users in their OFFICIAL DISCORD SERVER. but they really don't freaking care. FOR WHAT!!! Let me enjoy my single played game in peace without such rootkits installed on my system. Trash publisher, trash studio. I'll go back to playing DiRT 2 and 3 and Rally. F1 games probably going down this route as well?

Game actively checks if it's being run on a Steam Deck, and closes if it is. And how can I blame them for implementing such a check, game runs absolutely freaking piss poor on the thing! Even WRC Generations (on Steam Deck) runs and looks better than this. Or even Forza Horizon 5, a fully open world and dynamic game, on graphical settings that make it pleasing to look at without sacrificing performance too much. And on a more conventional rig, things aren't exactly better. Stutters once you load a stage for the first time, but even after playing on the same tracks, frametimes are in constant fibrillation, and you still experience stutters in fixed parts of tracks that were consistent for me with gameplay videos found on YouTube.

Other than that, game's alright.

Forza Horizon 5 Annoying Helicopter Adventure DLC

The forgiving driving model Forza has doesn’t really suit rally.

The quality of the F1 games has been on a decline since 2019. More attention went into useless season pass items than making the game work. Problems spanning from not working sector lights to crashes and a FPS graph that resembles an EKG of SVT. I'll gladly have my money back.

First of all, I (tried to enjoy) this game on Xbox to get my stolen money worth (mainly because I couldn't get it back thanks to anticonsumeristic practices), and played there extensively already. Second, I'd like to thank Codemasters for their outstanding marketing decisions, this review wouldn't be possible if they didn't render the game available for free. Third, to all of you saying that the hatred this game is getting is because we "expected a dirt rally 3" you can f*** right off, right now.

DIRT 5 is a clear example of what happens when most of your budget gets spent on flashy art, big names for your voice acting cast, ad-nauseam marketing, and paying reviewers to leave positive opinions about the game.

After the absolute letdowns of the Dirt Rally 2.0 DLC situation, GRID 2019 and Project CARS 3, Codemasters hit rock bottom with this... thing I wouldn't even dare to call a game. Marketed as the DiRT 2's spiritual successor and made from the creators of Onrush, Driveclub and Motorstorm (despite Codemasters Cheshire being currently made up by absolutely NONE of the people who made those games, but rather in good part by people who have never worked on a game before), ridiculously overpriced... nothing in this game, physics, graphics, gameplay, content - you name it - meets the quality you'd expect from a 55€ (70€ on consoles) title, euphemistically speaking. In fact, every aspect feels very mediocre, lazy, and an afterthought. And the feature that's being advertised the most on their social media isn't the actual gameplay, but all those in-game screenshots which showcase the game's "good graphics", taken with copious amounts of motion blur and rigorously at sunset to hide the very poor and blurry textures. Oh, and the playgrounds mode, a bootleg replica of Trackmania's editor, in the hope that user generated contents could compensate the lack of official ones.

- Game engine: DIRT 5 ditched the venerable EGO in favor of Onrush's engine, and recycled in a 1:1 copy most of its features, such as dynamic weather and "advanced" photomode (the weather is actually more complex in Onrush). While also discarding others, such as deformable terrain, replays and car damage. A maximum of 12 cars is allowed in a race... just like Onrush. When I was told that a "small" team of 70 people made this game in one year, I figured they had to spend the time and rush building a game engine (thus the lack of features), since they also told me the game was not running on the EGO engine. But as it seems, the only thing that's "new" in this game are the actual tracks, with some almost certainly outsourced 3D car models.
- Physics: they don't make any sense whatsoever (credit to friendo xdDDbx). While it's perfectly understandable that DIRT 5 is heavily arcade-oriented, that doesn't mean it should babysit the player without him having any saying... I mean, masterpieces such as DiRT 2 and 3 were arcade too, but their handling models felt... natural. DIRT 5 just ISN'T FUN. AT ALL. Where's the excitement of driving a car that doesn't let you keep a drift because it countersteers automatically? Where's the excitement of driving a car that reacts like it's make of plastic when colliding with other vehichles? Of driving with AI drivers who act like toddlers at a kindergarten being told to form an ordered line? Of driving a car when braking is heavily discouraged in favor of using walls or other drivers to turn? And if you're used to other games, you'll find yourself busy fighting your car instead of focusing on the actual race. And that's in a game carrying the name of DIRT. Heresy.
- Graphics and performance: runs like absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and the looks don't justify the poor FPS. Edges are super blurry thanks to a rather shoddy TAA. They would've been acceptable in the 360/PS3 era, but not in 2020 onwards. Developers and artists in the game designed maps using techniques you'd learn in the average "Basics of the Unity Engine for dummies 101" course. Such as tiling a single, blurry, small texture over a big low-poly 3d object. Once you notice it, you can't unsee it (you can spot it in Morocco stage). Anybody you read saying "omggg this game looks incredible!!!!" are most likely playing only on certain tracks, and at sunset. And they ask 60€. gah. Oh, and the game takes ages to load for some reason.
- Gameplay: physics were already described. Gamemodes have all the fancy names, but at the end of the day, it's the same stuff, just with different cars. With the exceptions being Pathfinder and Sprint. Certain car classes are unbearably slow, and within the same class, you're only going to use one vehichle out of them all (the one with the highest horsepower/weight ratio) because them giving a massive advantage in races, rendering the others pretty much useless.
- Content, features and progression: lacklustre is the word to describe it. You got a few wide ass tracks that all resemble one another gameplay wise, all available from the beginning, and on which you'll play the entirety of your career. Career being just a string of events next to eachother which will reward your "efforts" with shiny medals like a good boy who behaved well. The new DLC career events being merely additional casually picked events on those same tracks you could as well just play in quick play (arcade) mode. Sponsor progression very poorly explained and implemented, despite marketed as one of the key progression features of the game. Flashbacks? Nonexistant. Replays? Same. As far as progression is concerned, you win races, get money, buy cars. By the time you reach half of your career, you will have enough money to get all of the cars and have plenty to spare.
- AI: the most lifeless and boring I've ever seen in a racing game. Literally chasing their own racing line, at a constant distance one from the other.
- Online: hahahaha. Nonexistant. Dead on arrival. Because nobody has never played this game since launch, and never will.

And you get all of this experience along a buncha dudes randomly talking while you're at the menu to put up whatever "story" is behind the career mode, and the blandest, most uninspired and generic pop/alt. rock soundtrack to accompany you during your races (yeppppp definitely DiRT 2's spiritual successor lmfao).

EA, do us all a favor and please terminate this bunch of clowns already.

I'll start by saying that if you are a casual, all you want is purely TO RACE, you like arcade physics and you don't care about anything else, just go ahead and grab this game, it's an amazing game and totally worth it in that case, heck we really needed an arcadey racer as of lately and GRID does the job excellently.

All of the core gameplay is really solid and deserves praise. Which includes all aspects related to driving, especially with the AI in single player. Everything built around it, its packaging... is not. It just feels an unfinished game. I'd say, and please forgive me for this, it's like they made a pizza, they nailed the dough and made it perfect, but they chose toppings badly and they only half baked it. No matter how good the base, core thing is, we won't enjoy it as much if what accompanies it is just not on the same level, and will end up disappointing the customer. And in case the customer had tried their previous pizzas, which were near perfection, and now expects improvement from the new one...

This is why, if you're a fan of the franchise, I wouldn't recommend this game. I was really hyped for its launch, OMG GRID IS COMING BACK BOIS, i was excited and enjoying playing it for the first 30 minutes, then everything had died down rather quickly... also WHO THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO ONLY INCLUDE TAA AS ANTIALIASING OPTION, it makes everything blurry and not cool. This is one fix the game could get straight away in order to make it soooo much better.

- Atmosphere: as soon as we fire up the game we're greeted with a cold, lifeless menu, and its user interface looks like it was literally copy-pasted from all Codemasters games, namely DiRT Rally 1 & 2 and F1 2019; there's little to no introduction to the game's features, except for a short sequence the first time you start your career mode, which introduces you to the "bigger scheme of things" of the competition you have to win, and certain concepts like rivalries, nemesis, teammates and damage system; after that, your career is literally a big GRID of events you choose and have to compete in, in order to progress. You feel little to not involved at all. It feels like it has no soul at all. Just like its predecessor, GRID Autosport. it's nothing like the atmosphere you had in games like DiRT 2 and the previous GRIDs.

- AI: it could be my impression, but even on the most difficult settings, it's... easy. It's aggressive, but if you're skilled enough you can pretty much outqualify all the AI drivers and start ahead of the pack, and since you're skilled enough, this will result in a ezpz win at every race, because you will be long gone far away in the distance before the AI can catch up to you and show how aggressive it is. If on the other hand you decide to skip qualifying and if your driving style isn't on the aggressive side of the spectrum, you will find yourself locked in traffic (especially in tight tracks), and if you manage to get ahead of it, you will most likely be in the second half of the race and there will always be that one guy who's 5 seconds ahead of everyone else and you will hardly catch up to; on wide tracks, this issue is mitigated, as overtaking is easier. AI just needs to have a higher difficulty level and that's pretty much it. If you manage to only qualify up to midfield then really that's the sweet spot, and you're in for a good time.

***This change ALONE would make me recommend this game, actually. Because this AI behaviour you can't really see it anywhere else and it's the selling point of the game. Read below.***

- Team: I can't understand how deep this mechanic runs into the game. Judging by how little attention and detail the game gives to it, I think not much. It feels just a gimmick. You're supposed to have a teammate you race with, and you can give him "team orders" in order to attack or defend his position to help you or make your life harder, and you can as well turn him into your nemesis. But these team orders are seemingly ineffective on their actual performances. The team management is merely a list of people you can recruit in your team, in which their car group mastery, their cut from race earnings and their cost are listed; no sponsor manager, nothing that would make you determined in having your "team" stand out from the rest. This feature looks more like an afterthought rather than one of the main features of the game, like it's advertised. Heck, I don't even recall the game telling me I had my own team I could manage! This could have been a huge, interesting feature if properly implemented. Shame.

- Content: lack of it is what DiRT Rally 2.0 also suffered from at launch (then they added DLC buuut that's another story). In your career mode you will find yourself racing on pretty much the same tracks over and over and over and over. Even in different wheather and atmospheric conditions, they... pretty much remain the same tracks. And rain just gives you wet roads and reflections and that's it. I couldn't feel many differences handling-wise, and I play on controller with assists turned off.

- Content, pt.2: according to their website, they say there will be free content, including new circuits, which will be released to all users, independently from which edition of the game you own, but, looking at DiRT Rally 2... SEASON 1, 2 AND 3... I think we all know what's going to happen. Super Ultimate Hyper Deluxe edition when? The fact you can customize your cars with livreries of different "rarities" also makes me rather uncomfortable. We'll see what the post-launch monetization practices will be like. Race Driver: GRID rebooted into Race Driver: GREED?


But hey this game does have some good sides to it:

- AI, pt.2: their behavior is really well done. They react to you as you're trying to pass them, like, if you're on the inside line, they will overshoot the corner in order to reach the apex before you do, even if that means crashing on the outside wall of the turn. Or they will drive extra carefully closing all spaces if you're close but not too much. And if it's them trying to pass you, they will go for the inside line, even if that means trading paint with you. They make mistakes. They can feel pressure. And all of them are different. Unlike other games, you won't see an orderly line of cars following the ideal trajectory in a perfect manner. Even starting behind, it's amazing to watch them acting this way and battling eachother... and also seeing them desperately trying to catch up and collide with every single outside wall because they overdo with the speed.

- Graphics: yes the game looks pretty and everything, but would you play a game just because it looks good?

- Performance: Codemasters are truly masters of code and they live up to their name. The game is very smooth with some exceptions here and there, in the loading screen and in the opening scene of every race, where it may stutter of freeze shortly. Nothing impactful while you're driving though.

- Physics: GRID is an arcade, yet sim-oriented game and it does exactly this. The driving assists can be tuned to your preferences, and if you turn them off you're going to have a bad time when driving RWD vehichles. It can be unforgiving... but flashbacks are a thing thankfully. Cars have their own peculiar handling and they all feel different and require different kinds of approach, especially across different classes. Very good.

This game is just like Monopoly, it destroys friendships like Monopoly and it makes you want to commit suicide and mass murder just like Monopoly. However...

- It's simplified to the bone. All you do is roll a dice, land on a property, buy it / pay rent / rebuy it from a player. No trading, no auctions, no anything. Repeat for each turn.

- Pay to win: got a number from the dice roll you don't want? Pay some ingame currency and roll again! Or spend them to lock your dices in certain numbers, or to get a guaranteed double. If you land on a Hotel in Tokyo, just accept your fate and go bankrupt like a real man. Just like I did. Twice. In two matches. The only two matches I played.

10/10 would go bankrupt again instead of playing this crap.

Given my opinions and thoughts on its predecessor, I never thought I would've liked The Crew 2, let alone recommend it. But here I am. It's not a 100% recommendation, the game sure does have its flaws but for the price I paid during this sale, it's well worth it and deserves praise. And considering how much this game tries to get as close as possible to its competitor Forza Horizon, a comparison between the two games is as natural as it is mandatory. Let's examine its strengths:

Map: it's HUGE. I really mean it. It's huge unlike any other map you have seen in any other racing game. Looking at Forza Horizon's maps makes them look like they're the size of an ant. And unlike in The Crew 1, I get a feeling of traveling in the middle of nowhere much less frequently. Environments are diverse and there is more attention to details. Many opportunities for offroad. It really gives you a sense of freedom when exploring. Big yes.

Loading times: ... loading times? Never heard of that. Seamlessly teleport around the map and change vehichles on the fly. No waiting.

Content: cars? Let's be honest, that's the main reason we play this game for, right? Not just street-legal cars, but also offroad trucks and buggies, rallycross cars, and hypercars. But we ain't got only that. We have boats, planes and hovercrafts at our disposal as well. Which of course are a nice addition, but we're most likely going to spend most of our time in our beloved 4-wheel vehichles (2 wheel if you're into bikes, we got that too). And the game's car park is vast enough as well. Forza by contrast only offers cars... but a much wider selection of them.

Map activities: unlike in The Crew 1, these are not mandatory to grind in order to upgrade your car (which can take a serious amount of time if you're extremely unlycky), but there is only a goal to beat. That's it.

Sound: they're pretty good. That's judging from the Alfa Romeo Giulia, which sounds exactly like its real life counterpart, so I assume other sounds should be faithful to what they're supposed to reproduce.

Car performance upgrades: it's not good but it's still a great improvement from the previous game. Anytime you complete an event, you're guaranteed to receive a car part that's better than those already installed in your cars. And all performance parts are shareable across all vehichles in the same category, without being bound to the specific vehichle you obtained them with. You can potentially use a single high leveled car to obtain performance parts to upgrade all other similar vehichles almost instantly. Still not as good as just buying them with your own money but I'm not complaining...

Soundtrack: I can't describe how much more enjoyable this is compared to The Crew 1. I can finally play more than the only one decent song in the entire songlist.

Story: glad they ditched the story element. The plot in The Crew 1 was poor to say the least and I'd much rather have a generic motorsport event as a context than that. Annnnd this is where it's clear that this game is trying to get close to Forza Horizon. Win, progress across the various rounds of said generic competition, become the champion.

Now, to the "meh" parts:

Graphics: they're all but impressive. In fact it looks quite like The Crew 1. Except it even goes backwards. I'd like to know who thought it would be a good idea not to enable users to switch TAA off. The result is that the game looks like it's being run on console, extremely blurry at 1080p, like it was rendered at a lower resolution. While it can be disabled in a settings file, it breaks effects that rely on it, such as reflections. But hey, at least it will look crisp. Overall geometry detail is also mediocre. Oh, and also forced 60 FPS cap. No contest compared to Forza.

AI and difficulty: I'm getting Mario Kart flashbacks.The rubberbanding is just insane. And the difficulty balance across the events is way off. You will see opponents in front of you slowing down to let you pass only to see the same opponents zoom at godlike speeds past you once you're in front. And instead, in the RAID events, the prerecorded ghost is easy to beat, letting me win with a comfortable 40 seconds gap on average using a car with the recommended performance rating for the event.

Physics: better than the previous entry. Cars are still going to be prone to drifting and handbrake will still be useless (sending your car into an almost full stop the moment you press it and steer afterwards) but the driving experience remains overall enjoyable once you get used to it. It just... doesn't feel as natural as Forza.

Disciplines: this games does so many things at once and as a results doesn't shine in anything in particular. But being it arcade-oriented and given what I paid for it, it's not too much of a downside. It still includes and offers way more variety compared to its competitors.

Always-online: as far as I can tell, there is not too much focus on the online element... so why force us to be connected at all times? Folks with unstable internet connections such as myself don't like this you know.

In conclusion: give it a try. Not at a full price, though, or you risk feeling severely disappointed. In fact, I'd much rather pay full price on Forza than this. But overall... it's fun.

Scummy business practices. The game can be as good as you'd like, but us customers are being treated like crap. When we bought the "deluxe edition" at launch, we expected to get all the next content released after. Instead, that deluxe edition only covered for HALF of the post-launch content, and we have to pay another 30€ to get access to the newer contents (of which most are recycled from DiRT Rally 1, like the rally environments)... The DLC costs combined add up to the cost of the game itself. And us possessors of the deluxe edition don't even get a discount. Disappointment. I hope GRID won't follow like this.

Once we got that out of the way, here's a proper review of the game...

No name for a game has ever been so on point. This is DiRT Rally. Updated. Same formula, new content, slightly new mechanics, and a gorgeous new dressing. And it all comes in a pretty darn polished package.

Just like its predecessor, the physics and the driving model will keep you sh*tting your pants throughout all stages, particularly when you're traveling through fast sections and going over bumps. The car behaves as you expect it to, and it's very communicative as to how much available traction you have and how much more you can push even with a controller. And whenever you crash, you know it was your fault, and not the game's.

THE CAR WILL ACTUALLY REACT DIFFERENTLY ACROSS DIFFERENT SURFACES OMGGGG no seriously, it's very evident. Grippy on tarmac, a little bit more loose on gravel, completely sliding out of control (perhaps too much) on wet gravel.

You can upgrade your cars, choose from different types of tires to use in stages, track conditions will vary depending on your starting order. When you start in the last group, you'll actually feel you're going up and down the edges of the tire tracks left by those who raced before you.

Much of the content is recycled from previous games, including DLC's. They only come back with a graphical overhaul. But they look amazing.

The biggest update from its predecessor was the Rallycross mode, with a lot more tracks added.

I already mentioned the game looks amazing. And that's true. However, the hit on performance from all the new fancy looking stuff is pretty hard. And some options like ultra shadows and anything above medium crowd will literally make your framerate tank. And if you don't like jaggy edges, you'd better get used to, because you either have enough power for MSAA, or you settle for TAA, which makes everything look extremely blurry.

Bought it for 5€, regretted having downloaded 25GB after just less than 30 minutes of gameplay. Where do we start from...

Performance: perhaps it's the most evident weak point in this game. Frequent pop-ins and rendering bugs, such as shadows, but most importantly, guardrails, barriers and object along the way magically appearing right in front of your car. Pretty ugly. Also what's the point of being able to hold 120fps if there's microstutters making them feel like sub-30? That's with V-Sync disabled, and as far as I could read, enabling it is only going to make matters worse. It's as unpleasant for the eyes as it is headache-inducting.

Physics: I don't understand how both people and game description say these are realistic in any way. Collisions being the most evident ones, simply touching a barrier or a guard-rail will send your car flying in a barrel roll. Hitting a tree will make your car bounce and roll in the opposite direction than the one you'd expect it to. Cars are grippy and reactive on every surface and on every location in the exact same way, be it on tarmac, dirt or snow. You can really complete a stage in Sweden by applying full throttle at all times and barely touching the brakes. Leaving the road hardly punishes you, ever. I don't know if all of that is supposed to happen in real life. But I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to happen.

Stages: since all surfaces respond in the same way, you can conclude devs just took tarmac roads and retextured them with snow or dirt. The fact that they all seem so regular and flat without any deformation whatsoever further suggests that. Plus, they're just a succession of curves with different backgrounds for different locations. And they complained about DiRT Rally 2.0 stages not being unique and all resembling eachother...

The only positive sides to this are maybe the contents (game offers quite the amount of locations) and the fact that you have a free-roam mode (albeit little) in which you can test and play around with your car.

TL;DR: No. Don't buy. Not even for 5€. There are so many better alternatives out there.

Beware, this review contains a fair share of jokes coming from a Ferrari fan.

Codemasters? Check. ... really one would not need to say any further, because that is all you can ask for and want from a good racing game... it's a guarantee. And you know it's going to be even better when just looking at the benchmark sequence in the game feels more interesting than watching actual F1 races this season. But I digress. Back on topic...

One of the aspects of this game that was advertized and emphasized the most is the improved graphics compared to the previous installment in the series. Yes they do indeed look much better, at seemingly no cost in framerate. It actually feels much smoother than F1 2018. Could be the DX12 implementation, I haven't tested DX11. Game also holds just a little below 60 average fps @1080p 60fps on a GTX 960M at medium settings, so really kudos for the optimization. With F1 games, the framerates just have a tendency to magically grow across iterations when tested on the same hardware instead of going down. Just. Bwoah.

Fresh addition to the series is the Formula 2. You will start your career from there. And it will bring a nice little touch of background story to the single player mode. You'll have to play 3 short scenarios in which you'll get acquainted to two new characters, namely Lukas Weber, your teammate in F2, and Devon Butler, the guy you'll have to fight against armed to your teeth in order to earn the F2 champion title.
And they will follow you when you move on to F1, and will be racing in teams around the same performance level as the team you choose. So i doubt they would even appear at all if you chose Williams. Or Mercedes. But I digress again.

AI had a noticeable improvement too. It got a big boost in aggressiveness, you will be engaged in wheel-to-wheel battles, you will be challenged before corners and they will pull off defending moves to prevent you from overtaking instead of leaving very convenient spots open for you, closing you off or securing the inside lane. You will drop some difficulty points coming from older games. Strict flags and realistic damage only, no cheating. Git gud.

Driving model feels similar to older games, you will pick it up and go with no need to get used to it if you're coming from previous games. Cars do feel more understeery than before though. A gamepad is good enough, but be gentle on the throttle.

Now, to the bad points:

It crashes often. At least on my system. And alt-tabbing is a guaranteed crash. Codies, pls fix. I remind you I haven't tried DX11 yet so i can't tell whether DX12 is the cause.

Overall audio quality seems bad. It's really noticeable in the introductory video. Perhaps to save space. Perhaps it's my earphones. Fidelity is good though.

And finally, the weird points:

What do you mean Ferrari is more or less equal to Mercedes in terms of performance? And how can the engine be less competitive than their aerodynamics or chassis? Ferrari just basically built a dragster monster that's unable to turn specifically for Monza!
The 3 F2 scenarios are plainly staged. After the 3rd race, Butler mentions "things could've been different" had he not received the penalty... despite I won the race and was the first to get chequered flag. And in order to win the championship, i just needed to finish ahead of him. Hadn't he received the penalty he would've ended 3rd... and he would still have missed the F2 champion title. That is just an example.

Overall, definitely recommended. And now if you would excuse me, i'll go make Ferrari win their first races for this 2019 season.