#DIRT 4 PS3 GAMEPLAY SERIES#

There's New York's Roosevelt Island, the impossible geology of Guilin in China, colourful climbs through Meteora, Cape Town, Morocco's Dades Gorge and Italy's Carrara Marble Mine. Ten locations will feature, all with multiple tracks and seasonal variants. There's certainly scope and scale to it all. Yes, that does mean in-your-face voiceovers - this time from Nolan North and Troy Baker who play rival racers - but also it means an in-depth, engaging career mode that takes you across various disciplines.

#DIRT 4 PS3 GAMEPLAY SERIES#

As much as the boisterous action and vibrant locales bring to mind MotorStorm, so too do they hark back to Dirt 2 and Dirt 3 - a touchstone for Dirt 5's development team as it looks to Codemasters' series in its commercial prime. It certainly feels different, being made in Codemasters Cheshire's own engine and with a lightness of touch to the handling that's several worlds removed from the weighty consequence of Dirt Rally, yet it also feels reassuringly familiar. Some big names are onboard this time out - Donut Media provide in-game podcasts that help contextualise your progress, while the talented Sean Bull has lent a hand when it comes to custom liveries. It's loud and over-the-top and an awful lot of fun. Extreme weather is a key feature here, with electrical storms, snowstorms and heavy rain delivering the sort of drama I haven't seen in a racing game since MotorStorm Apocalypse. Dirt 5 is bright and brash and eye-searingly colourful, and isn't so much about threading through a sodden Welsh forest in the dead of night - you've got Dirt Rally for that - as it is muscling through overstated caricatures of international locales, tearing through a Norwegian fishing village as it's pounded by ocean waves, or screaming through a Brazilian favela before racing directly under Rio's Christ the Redeemer. Given how widely mourned the good old-fashioned arcade racer is, you certainly can't complain when one as unashamedly arcadey as this rolls up.

It should be no small surprise, then, that Dirt 5 often feels more like a new MotorStorm game than a new entry in Codemasters' long-running series. Made beyond the walls of Codemasters' Southam campus for the first time, it's being developed by the company's Cheshire studio, previously known as Codemasters Evo and of course before all that going under the Evolution banner.

Over the years Dirt has been many things - all-encompassing off-road driving experience, a hardcore rally simulator, a knockabout arcade racer - but Dirt 5 could well be the biggest departure yet.

Dirt 4 ps3 gameplay