Dakar 18

I spent years playing offload games. I’ve never played anything close to Dakar 18. Dakar 18 is based on the world-famous annual rally raid organized by Amaury Sport Organization (A.S.O.) in South America. The game does a real good job in taking your through the step in understanding how to play Dakar 18. You can choose from an array of vehicles raging from motorcycles, ATV’s, Cars and Trucks. They all come with factory names, such as MAN, Honda Yamaha, KTM and others along with there respective drivers

You have 3 different modes, rookie, competitor and Legend which, of course, it’s the hardest difficulty. In the rooking level, you have a Fall Out like compass to guide you to each way-point. You also have a co-driver telling you in what direction to go since they no visual road for you to see. You can’t see the way point either, on like other video games. It’s not overwhelming, but take short while to get use to it.

However, in the hardest difficulty, you have no compass to speak up, you will however, have your co-driver. If choose to drive a motorcycle or an ATV, you won’t have neither. You’re on your on and good luck to you!

How do you get around? You always have a Road Book to guide you. It take a while to figure out what the symbols mean and how to understand and read the Road Book. Once you do and with enough practice, Legend difficulty will be challenging but not frustrating by getting lost and having no idea where you are, where to go or how far back you should back track.

Dakar 18 has 14 locations. The maps are huge. Each of the maps have multiple stages. Early on, you may have 10 way points to grab in order all the way up to 60+ way points. Yeah, you’re going to be driving a while. The terrain varies from asphalt, dirt, rocky roads, slopes, dips, jump, how road are slightly hidden so you need to pay attention if not, you can get lost.

You have small villages with houses and people outside just waiting for you drive by. When you enter a village or small town, you greeted with a 30kpm speed limit. Yeah, no MPH. You need to maintain the speed limit until you exit the town. If you speed, you’re co-driver with scream at you and you’ll get a penalty. I speed just to hear him scream.

When you race, it might seem you’re alone but you’re not. There’s other races but it hard to sport them do to the sheer distance between you and the other racers. Still, there’s times you may run into another racer and just follow them if you feel lost. A cool feature Dakar 18 has, you can stop and help out another racer if their ride gets stuck in the mud.

The multiplayer aspect is the same set up as single player. To only difference is you can invite your friends to a private lobby or, crate a public lobby. You invite your friends, choose a location, difficulty settings, what type of ride you want to use, weather condition, and you can also tweak your rides. If you abuse your car to much, it can brake down and you’ll be out of the race. If you get a flat, you need to get out of the car and fix it. If you get stuck in the mud, you need to unstuck yourself and figure out the best way to do so.

Dakar 18 has an Explore mode where you can choose to do a quick race, run the tutorial as a refresher, Training and Treasure Hunt where you have to drive all around looking for a Treasure item located somewhere in the map. Also, you can explore the entire map on your own. If you enjoy off-road racing, I strongly recommend Dakar 18. Also, Dakar Desert should be dropping sometime this year in 2022 if it does not get pushed back. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on Dakar Dessert when it launches.