Dakar Desert Rally Review

ign.com:

For the most well-known rally raid event in motorsport, there really haven’t been that many games based on the Dakar Rally over the last 40-odd years. There appear to be just five, actually – and one of those is an 8-bit, 1988 fever dream where your car has guns and you get from France to Africa by driving… under the sea avoiding giant starfish, lobsters, and many torpedoes. Perhaps adapting the Dakar into a game is as difficult as winning the thing in real life? This would certainly explain Dakar Desert Rally, where I’ve been zigzagging between enjoying its genuinely immersive moments of brilliance and cursing its bugs, uneven performance, odd design choices, and often unresponsive handling, which have effectively counteracted just about everything it does well.

There’s no denying Dakar Desert Rally is a massively ambitious – and ambitiously massive – off-roader, and there are definitely glimpses of the gusto with which the developer, Saber Porto, has approached distilling this gruelling event into a digestible and, in many ways, unique racing game. Most impressive is the environment itself. The vast swathes of open desert are a particular highlight; even though they may sound barren and uninteresting, emerging from twisting valleys or clumps of palm trees into these undulating oceans of sand makes for a racer with a rare sense of scale. Even in its heftiest racing trucks, Dakar Desert Rally made me feel puny ascending its mountainous dunes – especially with its neat helicopter camera – and it’s in moments like these that Dakar Desert Rally is at its strongest. The time of day effects are lovely, and the dazzling wild weather effects are striking too; they don’t really seem to add an overt layer of danger to the racing