Baja: Edge of Control
Cutting edge or edge of your patience?
By Jeremy Azevedo
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One thing that I dislike about racing games is that they tend to always be about “underground” street racing or high-performance track racing. |
Not since Midway’s “Super Off Road” have I played a really decent dirt track racer. I’m sure that there have been many, but Baja: Edge of Control is the first I’ve played in quite some time that wasn’t a bare-bones arcade-y affair or an overly technical simulation.
Baja: EOC starts out a little mixed… The difficulty seems incredibly unreasonable at first, and there is no information given about the various cars that you have to choose from other than what they are called and what paint jobs are available. There isn’t really anything resembling a tutorial, and even on the easiest setting the other cars on the track blow you away by a wide margin. Even after upgrading my car to it’s maximum potential, I still struggled to place in the early races. And then something just clicked. Once I got the hang of managing my speed around turns, popping the clutch for an acceleration boost after a powerslide and pre-loading my shocks before a jump, it was a whole new game. What I’m saying is that the learning curve is a real motherf**ker.
The A.I. doesn’t make things any easier for you, either, as coming anywhere near them almost always causes your wheels to lock up. The A.I. will never attempt to disengage you, and can almost never be run off the road (although you sure as hell can). In the rare instance that you do manage to bump a pesky opponent off the side of the cliff, you will feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment, as it is not easy to do. Your fellow racers don’t rubber band after you if you manage to build up a huge lead, which is nice, but again this happens rarely. The terrain is so rugged that even going in a straight line is difficult to do. No lead is guaranteed to be safe from imminent disaster, which sounds potentially frustrating but actually makes them game a hell of a lot more exciting.
The visuals in Baja: EOC are awesome. Great detail, great lighting effects and a good sense of speed, especially in cockpit view (although I’d pop a Dramamine before using cockpit view, it’s a bumpy ride). Some might call the visuals “barren” but I think it adds a great deal to the character of the game. You sort of feel like Mad Max barreling through the wasteland in a crazy custom desert buggy… I kind of wish there were weapons!
There’s a lot of different race types to choose from, one of which is an endurance race that lasts three or four hours that I’m sure no one will ever do. There’s also a great incentive to upgrade your car, and a lot of different ways to do so. You can even fine tune your car to expert specifications if you know what you’re doing, but you’d have to be a mechanic to know the difference between one thing and the other. Ultimately the replayability factor is fairly legit, and I think that once you really dive into the game, you will probably find yourself occupied for countless hours before you even come close to doing everything there is to do in Baja: Edge of Control.
Score: 7 out of 10
+2 if you are a hardcore off road enthusiast.
-1 if you are more of an arcade-style racer.
