Dakar Desert Rally

I see two main classes of bad reviews for this game: 1) constant performance issues and crashing, and 2) "game is too hard."
I've been playing for nearly 10 hours now and have had no performance issues or crashes (I cap my frames at 75 FPS to reduce my power bill). I run a mere Nvidia 2080 Ti GPU with a Ryzen 7 1700 (non-X) CPU. My tech is oooold. Yet I have no issues.
BUT - I'm on Windows 10. I suspect that this game, like most games, suffers severe performance and stability issues on Windows 11, and that's where the complaints come from. Remember, kids: if your expensive PC sucks, it's likely because you're on Windows 11.
In terms of the game being too hard, I think people misunderstand what this product is. It's NOT a racing *game*; it's a racing *sim*. It's meant for deranged people like myself who want unreasonable challenges. This is a great ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sim. It doesn't hold your hand, and it doesn't make things easy.
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Onto the actual review: it does some things really well, and some things really poorly. Overall, I can recommend it for people who appreciate really difficult rally games.
The good:
* Graphics are incredible.
* Accurately portrays Dakar navigation (it's really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard).
* The damage model is REALLY good. Front left wheel hit a boulder? You no longer have a front left wheel. Radiator took damage but you didn't see the temps rising? Blown gasket; forfeit. Clutch cable broke? Welcome to 1st-gear world.
* Many community tracks outside of career mode.
* Doesn't lock vehicles behind career progress while in free roam.
* Free roam allows endless (and aimless) exploration of the deserts, and they are HUGE. I've clocked 100's of kilometers going in one direction (you have an odometer).
* Many camera modes, including in-vehicle views.
The bad:
* Doesn't have multiple-monitor support like, e.g., Flight Simulator does. The reason this matters is because if, like me, you want a real-life co-driver literally sitting next to you on the couch, they need to do their navigation from your driver perspective instead of a dedicated passenger perspective, which is not ideal. It's not a deal breaker, though - the co-driver still receives all their relevant information from the HUD - but it's somewhat immersion-breaking and means that I, the driver, need to go through the mental effort of ignoring some parts of the HUD so as not to get distracted.
* When playing on controller, the acceleration button doesn't first attempt to brake when the car is rolling backwards. It's an annoyance and hurts launch times.
* Replays don't show navigation tulips, meaning that you and your co-driver cannot effectively assess what went well vs. what went wrong after the race.
The ugly:
* Motion blur and depth of field are mixed into a single slider called "post-processing," with no indication of what other graphical effects "post-processing" includes. Any self-respecting gamer *immediately* disables motion blur, especially in racing games. Depth of field is generally a bad idea for racing games as well. Luckily, setting post-processing to low doesn't seem to actually reduce graphical quality at all, yet does disable motion blur and depth of field.
* Quad bikes are apparently really poorly implemented, though I haven't tried them myself as it's not a category that interests me.
* I've seen many people complain about corrupted save games. I've not experienced this myself, but I'm not taking chances. Do savegame backups up daily, location is C:\Users\YOUR_USER\AppData\Local\Dakar2Game
Overall, I give this sim a 9/10 despite the issues just because nothing else gives me hardcore desert rally maps apparently going forever in every direction.

Every Dakar season I reinstall this game give it another go. At first I didn't really enjoy it, but over the years its really grown on me. Yes Its flawed but also amazing. There are def some odd stability issues that come and go.
I mainly just run the bikes in 1st person and in the end, you can run over an hour long simulation stages with 100's of checkpoints. Turn off your HUD, brush up on your French and get totally lost in the desert, there is nothing else that gives this experience.

Took about 2 hours of game play before the fatal error occurred. Switched to another race for now and I'm still trucking in career mode. That's the bad part. I still thumbs up the game because there's nothing like it in my opinion, except maybe Baja? If you are of fan of rally racing, then you'll like it. It is skills based, so at first I thought the controls were just wacked out, but now it is very natural and I podium about half the time. I hope the devs stay on this project and the community grows because I could see it being my favorite PVP game if there were more online players.

great game but there is still a fatal error but maybe it is due to the influence of PC performance

I decided to revisit Dakar and it certainly is an odd yet really addicting Sim racing title.
This is not for the faint of heart, You really need to know how to navigate through barren deserts to your waypoints, Especially on Bikes and Quads since you don't have a navigator.
Most of your time will likely be spent in the Cars Trucks and side by sides for that reason alone. And while this game has a casual forza like racing mode your really here for the Pro/Sim modes with the realistic dakar experience.
I would recommend this to anyone wanting a truly unique challenge, Though be warned as the game has optimization issues though i have not experienced those myself.

Incredibly underrated and fairly unique game. No technical issues for me

hard at start, but harder to stop a
having just one more go.....just fun