Dakar 18

My first honest reaction after an hour with Dakar 18 was equal parts fascinated and genuinely annoyed, which is probably the most accurate summary of the whole experience. This is not a racing game in any conventional sense. There are no lap timers against visible rivals, no rolling start lines with other cars nose-to-tail. It is orienteering on wheels across a massive open South American landscape, and when it clicks, that is exactly as compelling as it sounds. The core loop runs like this: you pick one of five vehicle classes (cars, trucks, bikes, quads, or SxS buggies), choose your difficulty, and then set off across 14 stages spanning Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina, chasing checkpoint waypoints using a roadbook navigation system pulled from the real Dakar Rally 2018. On Rookie mode you get a compass arrow pointing at the next waypoint, which is approachable enough for patient newcomers. Bump up to Competitor difficulty and the compass disappears entirely. Now you are listening to your co-driver call pace notes, reading coordinate strips, and hoping you didn't drift two kilometres off course without noticing. Miss a waypoint and the penalty is brutal: a 15-to-20 minute time hit that effectively ends any hope of a competitive finish, or a full stage restart that costs you up to an hour of progress. No rewind. No reset. That ruthlessness is authentic to the sport, but the game does nothing to soften the frustration when the co-driver fires a call late and you have already sailed past the turn. The vehicle roster is where Dakar 18 gets genuinely uneven. Cars and trucks handle with enough stability to make the navigation challenge feel fair. Trucks are slow, heavy, and actually forgiving on rough ground. The SxS buggies are a surprisingly solid middle-ground pick. Bikes and quads, though, are a different story entirely. The bikes are skittish and twitchy in a way that feels less like simulation and more like broken input response, and the quads are widely considered close to unplayable, snaking uncontrollably across the desert no matter how gently you manage the throttle. Steering wheel support exists and force feedback is present, but wheel configuration is rough around the edges. Gamepad is the safer choice for most people, though even that has its own inconsistency issues on straights versus corners. This is firmly a solo, slow-burn experience. Multiplayer exists with online stages and a Treasure Hunt mode for up to 8 players, plus split-screen, but servers were effectively dead at launch and have not recovered. Do not buy this expecting Saturday night co-op sessions with your crew. The world itself deserves credit. The playable area is enormous and the Peruvian dunes in the early stages have genuine visual scale. Environments get progressively less inspiring as the stages push into Bolivia and Argentina, and frame rate issues show up in the denser later sections. The co-driver AI, praised in places for being organic and useful, is criticized just as often for mis-timing calls in ways that cost you significant time. Load screens are long. Bugs at launch included vehicles getting irretrievably stuck, online sessions hanging on loading screens indefinitely, and AI competitors that weaved chaotically or materialised from nowhere. Post-launch patches addressed some of these, but the underlying handling inconsistencies and sparse content were never resolved. If your weekend gaming group wants a noisy, accessible four-player racing night, this is the wrong shelf entirely. But if you have a specific itch for rally raid simulation, tolerate demanding navigation games, and can accept a game that feels like a passion project that shipped six months too early, Dakar 18 offers something genuinely rare: the only modern attempt at a proper cross-country rally sim on this scale, frustrations and all.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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