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DiRT Showdown is an arcadey driving game. I avoid the term “racing game”, since racing is not the only (though perhaps the biggest) part of the game. Unlike other DiRT games, Showdown capitalizes on Destruction Derby-like game modes that focus on crashing your car against others more than avoiding collisions.
In the Showdown Tour, being the main game mode, we have 4 series of races, each of them including 13 races in various gamemodes. Let's go over them real quick.
First, we have the purely racing modes. Race Off is as simple as racing gets: first to finish line wins. Then there's Eliminator, where every 20-ish seconds the last driver drops out of the race, Domination, where you drive a few laps trying to get the best possible time in each segment of the track, and 8-Ball, being almost like Race Off, but with the race track including numerous crossroads, ending up with cars crashing straight into their opponents' sides, often ending up with half the drivers not finishing the race at all because of how much damage they took. The racing modes are all quite solid and fun, and imho the best part of the game.
Then we have the modes where havoc and destruction are the main objective. First is Rampage, where you get the more points the more damage you do to other cars. A small variation of Rampage is Knockout, being basically the same thing but on a stage, so you can push others out of the arena for extra points. Lastly we have Hard Target, where we're trying to survive as long as possible having every single opponent trying to chase us down and wreck us on a small, enclosed arena. I found the destruction modes alright, less skill-based than the racing ones, but quite fun to play and exciting.
Now, in this case, “last but not least” doesn't fit too well. The last modes are imo the weakest part of the game, not fitting the racing nor the smashing themes too well. First we have Trick Rush, where we try to do tricks like jumps, drifts and obstacle smashing in an small area filled with ramps and obstacles. Then there's Head 2 Head, being a set of tricks you have to do sequentially on a race track while a single opponent tries to do it faster. Lastly, and I did save the worst for last, we have Smash Hunter. On a big, open space we have to hunt for colored barries to drive right through. The order is not known upfront, and while there exists an optimal driving path that'll take us through all required barriers in the shortest time, it's not very easy to figure out what it is; in one case it even includes driving straight through a wooden fence, which is apparently destructible too: a mechanic that the game doesn't introduce or explain before. A small help is an ability to rewind time a few times each race, but even with that I found Smash Hunter more annoying than not, and felt relieved when I finally got that 3rd place and could move on to the fun stuff.
I mentioned that the game puts quite a bit of focus on the destruction aspect, so let's look into that a bit. In all gamemodes the game gives you an incentive to harass your opponents by smashing your car into theirs, which fills your boost bar that you can later use for increasing your acceleration temporarily. The harder you hit them the more boost you get (hitting them at a 90 degree angle is worth more than slightly bumping their rear), and all cars have a health bar (regenarating, but so slowly that it hardly changes anything). In classic, racing modes a car with health reduced to zero is removed from the race completely (but remains on track as an obstacle), while in the destruction modes is respawned after a moment. Even in the simple Race Off events I found giving another driver an “Insane T-Bone” a lot of fun, and I can imagine it gets even better when playing with friends (Showdown supports both splitscreen and online multiplayer).
You can't mention destruction without mentioning the Announcer. He accompanies you through the entire game, commenting every collision and overtake that happens, and while some of his jokes are a bit lame (“it's like watching two cars drive into each other! Oh wait, they do”) he doesn't repeat himself too often and I think he adds quite a bit of charm to the game; I haven't even considered disabling him for a moment. In the background of the announcer we have the music, consisting mostly of various rock (mostly heavy and fast-paced) and some drum-n-bass-ish tracks. I didn't find a way to disable individual ones, which some people like, but personally I didn't feel a need to; I think they fit the game pretty well.
Apart from the Showdown Tour the game also features a Joyride mode. It puts us on one of two big, open areas, where we can complete a total of 150 missions while not constrained by any time limit. 150 sounds like a lot, but in reality the “missions” are just single tricks in specific places, like “jump between blue containers” or “drift under the crane”. Some are more challenging than others, but none from the 40-ish that I completed took me more than 5 minutes, with some (like “smash the red boxes”) taking almost no time at all. In addition to missions there's also Hidden Packages, similar to Secret Tapes from Tony Hawk series. Some are quite cleverly hidden, and apparently there's a bonus for finding them all, but I didn't take the time. I suspect it's a unique car unlock or something.
I didn't mention cars themselves yet, and there's a reason for that. We have quite a huge set of cars to choose from, unlock, and buy with in-game money that we earn from winning races. They all have statistics like Power, Handling, Strength etc, and sometimes we can spend extra money to upgrade them. Does it actually matter though, that's another story. Game employs rubberbanding quite heavily: when you're behind, your opponents will slow down so you can catch up with them, when you're ahead, they'll get a speed boost and sometimes absurdly overtake you right before the race ends. As an experiment I took the fastest car I unlocked and tried my best in the first race in the game, and while my car was visibly faster than others and I was able to finish 1st without even using boost, it still took me a few tries to do it, with opponents surprisingly overtaking me every now and then. That makes me doubt if unlocking and upgrading cars actually gives you any edge in the end, but perhaps it does make sense in multiplayer, which hopefully doesn't do rubberbanding.
All in all, I had a lot of fun with DiRT Showdown. It took me 12 hours to complete, and while I wish I could forget the time spent playing Smash Hunter, I enjoyed the game a lot. While it's not a realistic driving simulator, far from it, it's a really enjoyable casual racing game, and I can easily see myself having some good time with it at a LAN party or hopping on Joyride every now and then to play a few missions.