A cross-country motorsports sim racer, Dakar 18 fails to convey the much-needed sense of speed, while its vehicles don't feel at all realistic in how they handle, ultimately resulting in a huge missed opportunity.
Dakar 18 is a Dakar motorsports simulation racer available from retail stores and for download from the PlayStation Store for the PS4. Can Dakar 18 deliver an entertaining simulation of the legendary endurance challenge?
Gameplay begins with a compulsory tutorial that sees your co-driver narrating an introduction including the objective and rules of Dakar, how to utilise the road book, how to follow the waypoint indicator, how to repair car components such as the clutch that will want to break every minute or so within the tutorial and much more besides followed by attempting to complete a stage through the various waypoints. Everything is thrown at the player far too fast, despite the complexities of some of the navigation tools that you must understand; therefore the tutorial can feel more along the lines of learning how to drive a real car for someone who does not know how to drive. Meanwhile, a separate training feature consists of five lessons covering how to follow tracks, read CAP headings, tracks and offroad, offroad navigation and offroad and dangers, although it is not much more useful than the opening tutorial.
Adventure mode is essentially Dakar 18’s career mode; comprising of 14 Dakar stages situated throughout a multitude of countries were participants have their efforts timed to decide their position within each stage that is progressively aggregated together over the course of the Dakar season. Treasure hunt mode tasks the player in finding a variety of collectible artifacts within stages with only a treasure chest icon on a map to loosely guide you in the general direction.
Vehicle design is quite varied as there are five vehicle classes including cars, bikes, trucks, quads and SxS. Each vehicle class has officially licensed manufacturers and vehicles including car manufacturers Mini, Mitsubishi, Peugeot, Renault and Toyota; bike manufacturers Honda, Husqvarna, KTM and Yamaha; truck manufacturers Kamaz, Man, Maz, Renault and Tatra; quad manufacturer Yamaha; and SxS manufacturer Polaris. Every vehicle has to be repaired upon incurring damage when driving or riding a vehicle over the terrain. There are a multitude of core components that can be repaired including the radiator, brakes, clutch, gearbox, fuel tank, oil tank, electronics, suspension, transmission and tires.
Dakar 18 is situated in Pisco, Peru; Marcona, Peru; Arequipa, Peru; La Paz, Bolivia; Uyuni, Bolivia; Tupiza, Bolivia; Belen, Argentina; Fiambala, Argentina; San Juan, Argentina; and Cordoba, Argentina. Despite the tutorial rather oddly making reference to forbidden areas that provides only 10 seconds to turn around and drive back in the direction you were previously situated; Dakar 18 is set within an open-world environment design. Dakar takes place over a variety of surfaces such as giant sand dunes, rocky terrain and differing surfaces that are capable of slowing any vehicle quite significantly. Dakar 18’s environment design conveys how going off the preferred path can not only gain you time through finding a faster method of driving or riding from point A to point B, but also how dangerous it can be to attempt a different path as it will often result in the player ultimately becoming lost, while losing time and ground on the stage leaders in the process.
Dakar 18 does not convey a realistic sense of speed as no matter what vehicle class is chosen; every vehicle has the same sense of speed at 1km per hour in comparison to 125km per hour; therefore it feels the complete opposite of racing from waypoint to waypoint through the desert at high speeds.
Handling within a couple of the vehicle classes are more manageable than others such as the quad, bike and trucks have handling reminiscent to that of an oil tanker; you will want to steer in a particular direction or angle, but will need multiple attempts to avoid an obstacle or remain on the appropriate track. Far too often the player will find oneself having to steer in the opposite direction to correct the steering followed by immediately having to steer back the other way to correct it yet again, but it is not really an accurate feeling of understeer or oversteer as neither would be recurring anywhere near this regular in any vehicle in real life. Rather bizarrely; quads, bikes and trucks are all capable of turning around in a circle as though it is steering itself even when the health of each vehicle component is at 90 to 100%. There is also no sense of weight distribution driving or riding through the air after a large sand dune inevitably results in crashing your vehicle and falling off your bike or quad; whereas handling in MotoGP, MXGP or Supercross games would allow you to distribute the rider’s weight to improve the player’s chances of remaining on the motorbike. Meanwhile, damage modelling is realistic as crashing too heavily causes your vehicle to not be able to change gear or reverse.
Dakar 18 is yet another racer that is marred by the potential overabundance of time penalties without the option of turning off the time penalties such as a ridiculous 15 minutes penalty for needing to be repositioned at the previous waypoint after getting lost due to the complexity of the navigation system and co-driver’s pace notes, while repairing any vehicle component endures a minimum of a 3 minute penalty for every occasion any component needs to be fixed; therefore the player can easily incur more time penalties in comparison to the actual time that has been set.
There are five camera angles including a third-person perspective positioned close to the back of the vehicle that can be rotated 360 degrees; a first-person perspective from the cockpit of the vehicle; a further first-person perspective positioned at the front of the vehicle without showing any of the vehicle’s bodywork; another first-person perspective positioned on the bonnet when driving certain vehicles such as a car; and an elevated camera angle situated on a helicopter. However, despite how good it is that the helicopter view exists in the first place; the helicopter’s aerial view does not dynamically follow the vehicle via the appropriate angle resulting in the player having to consistently pan the camera angle and even then it does not show far enough into the distance to be able to have the desired effect.
Downloadable content is available including the return of Dakar and WRC legend Ari Vatanen and the Desafio Ruta 40 Rally.
Dakar 18’s remote play performance retains the graphics, audio and general performance of the PS4 version. However, there are no remote play control optimisations resulting in holding the top right of the rear touch pad to accelerate and pressing the top left of the rear touch pad to brake or reverse, although accelerating and braking can be remapped to holding R and L respectively.
There are two sets of controls between the vehicle and your character when on foot with the controls being appropriately mapped to the DualShock 4 controller for a control scheme that would be anticipated from a racer or driving game and are mostly customisable, although the steering is not as responsive as it should be. The default vehicle control scheme consists of holding R2 to accelerate; pressing L2 to apply the brake or reverse the vehicle; pressing X to manually shift up a gear; pressing square to manually shift down a gear; pressing O to engage the handbrake; holding O to exit the vehicle; pressing triangle to switch the camera angle; pressing R1 or L1 to view the next or previous roadbook note respectively; pressing right on the d-pad to switch the windshield wipers on or off; pressing left on the d-pad to turn the headlights on or off; pressing up or down on the d-pad to scroll up or down the kilometres respectively; pressing L3 to toggle high or low gear when driving a truck; moving the direction of the left analogue stick to the left or right to steer your vehicle in that direction; moving the direction of the right analogue stick to pan the camera around the vehicle; pressing R3 to reposition the camera angle; pressing the share button takes you to the share feature menu; and pressing the options button to display the pause menu. The default character control scheme consists of pressing X to interact; pressing up on the d-pad to equip a shovel; pressing O to use a shovel; pressing down on the d-pad to ask for help; holding R2 while moving to run; pressing square while moving to jump; pressing triangle to take your crash helmet off or put it back on your character; changing the direction of the left analogue stick to the left or right to move your character in that direction; and moving the direction of the right analogue stick to pan the camera around the character. Tapping the touch pad displays the vehicle repair menu and a map of your surroundings, while vibration occurs when driving or riding your vehicle over rocky or bumpy terrain. There is no light bar support that could have produced yellow to signal that you are heading in the correct direction, momentarily green for passing through a waypoint, red when crashing a vehicle and flashing red when your vehicle is in serious need of repairs.
Graphically, Dakar 18 has some nice sand dunes, but pop-up on foliage, shadows, pixelated lens flare and re-texturing environments in the far distance even during single player gameplay does not provide the realism anticipated from a simulation racer, while some of the vehicle and character animations are not authentic to how a vehicle or person would react.
Dakar 18’s presentation does not have a good user interface across various menus such as the title menu, main menu, adventure mode menus, multiplayer menus, explore menus, rankings menus, options menus and various gameplay menus as the text is too small and is often positioned incorrectly such as the difficulty level descriptions that are situated over the vehicles with the colour of some of the vehicle clashing with the text colour. Menu backgrounds include a vehicle situated in the vast desert surroundings and cracks within the track surface, while every menu selection has an individual background.
Voice-overs include the co-driver’s narration of the tutorial and pace notes when driving particular vehicles, while sound effects include your vehicle accelerating and crashing, alongside atmospheric instrumental music. There is no DualShock 4 speaker implementation that could have produced your co-driver’s pace notes.
The trophy list includes 55 trophies with 46 bronze trophies, 6 silver trophies, 2 gold trophies and 1 platinum trophy. Easier trophies include the Going Places bronze trophy for finishing a Dakar 18 stage and the Clean Driving bronze trophy for completing a Dakar 18 stage without missing a waypoint as both trophies are far easier in rookie difficulty. Harder trophies include almost a third of the trophy list for finding collectibles in treasure hunt mode; The Navigator bronze trophy for completing an entire Dakar 18 without ever missing a waypoint; the Competitor Winner silver trophy for finishing Dakar 18 in first place during competitor difficulty; and the Legend Winner silver trophy for finishing Dakar 18 in first place during legend difficulty. There are two split-screen or online multiplayer focused trophies including the Multi-Hat Trick bronze trophy for winning three consecutive stages in multiplayer and the Hard Driver bronze trophy for driving 10,000km in multiplayer. It is estimated that depending upon skill and a good trophy guide to provide some helpful tips that it would take between 40 to 50 hours to platinum the trophy list.
There are three difficulty levels including rookie, competitor and legend with the major differences being that the easiest difficulty level has a compass helper when offroad, your vehicle has a higher resistance to damage, repairs cost less Dakar points, easier A.I. controlled opponents and an autosave at each waypoint. Meanwhile, competitor’s normal difficulty level is harder in comparison to rookie difficulty by not having a compass to assist you when offroad, less resistance to vehicle damage, a greater cost of Dakar points and additional time when repairing the vehicle, more intelligent A.I. controlled opponents and retaining an autosave at each waypoint, although the hardest difficulty level in the form of legend is not unlocked until having completed Dakar 18 on competitor difficulty.
Split-screen multiplayer offers horizontal or vertical split-screen for two players, although there are some unnecessary limitations such as having to choose the same vehicle class instead of being able to select separate vehicle categories, while if one driver has a better vehicle specification the second player cannot choose the same driver and is then at a disadvantage. Meanwhile, split-screen multiplayer will only allow players to race on a stage that has already been unlocked in single player, while there is no option to have any A.I. controlled vehicles involved in the race and the bonnet camera angle is not optimised as the bonnet is not viewable unless the player pans the camera angle downwards. There is no co-driver audio in split-screen multiplayer that makes it harder for both players to navigate their surroundings, although co-driver audio could have simultaneously been produced through each DualShock 4 speaker to clearly define each player’s co-driver audio. It is also too easy to be thrown out of a split-screen multiplayer race such as losing control of your vehicle and hitting a barrier or fence is all that it takes for one of the two players to be taken out of the race without any option to continue due to racing misconduct; again emphasising the lack of attention to making it entertaining during split-screen multiplayer.
Online multiplayer supports 2 to 8 players, although don’t always expect to be able to play it that often as instead of releasing smaller, more manageable updates of 2GB every week or so; Dakar 18 has 35GB or larger updates per update, then there is the lack of optimisation for each update resulting in Dakar 18 being 83.66GB after version 1.02 rather than replacing areas that it is supposed to be improving, while at least a further 35GB can be added on top of that for version 1.04 to make Dakar 18 larger than Red Dead Redemption 2 or for that matter Doom or Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus with all of the updates and season pass content.
Dakar 18’s replayability stems from its open-world environment design, adventure mode and treasure hunt mode, five vehicle classes and three difficulty levels, although the gameplay itself is not as entertaining as it should be in single player or multiplayer.
Hard Drive Space Required: 83.66GB (PS4 Blu-Ray Disc/PSN Download – Version 1.02/At least another 35GB required for Version 1.04 onwards)
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Jason
Jason plays all genres of games and enjoys all different kinds of experiences that the games industry has to offer. Jason’s favourite PlayStation exclusive franchises throughout various eras include: Crash Bandicoot, God of War, Gran Turismo, inFamous, Killzone, Little Big Planet, MotorStorm, Resistance, Spyro the Dragon, Uncharted, Wipeout and various games that never became big name franchises. A special mention goes to Black Rock’s superb Split Second: Velocity as it is rather unbelievable that it will never receive a sequel.
Jason now mainly plays modern PlayStation games on home console and portably, but occasionally returns to the old retro classics on the 3DO, PS1 and PS2 such as discovering Cool Spot Goes to Hollywood 20 years after its original release on PS1. Jason is happy to see gaming coming full circle with updates for retro classics such as Alien Breed, Superfrog and Crash Bandicoot.
