Handling for the cars and side-by-sides is a little more tameable than the bikes, but only mildly. Bikes are a little better – they don’t feel quite as delicate – but they’re still prone to regular losses of control. Quads are awful to ride, hopelessly sensitive to directional changes. Unfortunately there’s also a vast gulf between what’s fun to pilot and what absolutely isn’t. Dakar Desert Rally includes a formidable assortment of rally raid machinery representing all the competing vehicle classes, and there’s a very good damage model here. Quick-resume is a useful crutch, but losing XP levels, new vehicles, cash, and completed rallies – and being reverted to a random mid-race checkpoint from hours and hours ago – is enormously frustrating.Īt one stage I lost three vehicles, several XP levels, and thousands of credits.Įqually frustrating is the handling model. Piles of progress are disappearing after quitting, despite the autosave icon blinking away throughout. There’s minor stuff, like the scratches and shattered windscreen on my Iveco Powerstar never completely going away regardless of how many times I pay for repairs, or the music still being audible on 0% volume, but the crippling autosave issue I’m currently experiencing on Xbox Series X is much worse. The growing list of bugs I’ve encountered certainly doesn’t help, either. I actually even thought the modes might have been mislabelled at first, but no – Resolution Mode is easily the pick. The resulting unevenness is quite dreadful at times. It may indeed hit 60 frames per second when conditions are right but it’s certainly not locked there, and it flutters around noticeably when the screen is packed with sand-slinging competitors. Performance Mode, which apparently sacrifices pixels for frames, looks considerably worse to my naked eye. In Resolution Mode the framerate is pegged at a steady 30 frames per second, and that consistency keeps it looking suitably smooth. It’s a problem, for instance, that on Xbox Series X Dakar Desert Rally’s Resolution Mode actually looks smoother than its Performance Mode. ![]() Some games are released in early access, and some are just released too early. The updates will be free but, combined with the fact Saber Porto has also relegated race team customisation and even replays to later updates, it all contributes to a feeling this thing just isn’t quite finished. Disappointingly, free-roam driving and custom events are slated to arrive as updates later this year. This environment reportedly weighs in at a whopping 20,000 square kilometres – what Saber Porto has described as the biggest racing game open world ever – but unfortunately there’s no way to get a sense of the full scope of it at launch. 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 other than a slight decrease in visibility, but they are wonderfully atmospheric. 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 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. Most impressive is the environment itself. ![]() 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.
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