BAJA: Edge of Control

One of my many lists is a list of games that have an online requirement in them. This is the list that Baja appeared on because it has the one solitary online achievement that doesn’t even require a second player, just access to an online lobby – so an internet connection. That’s the reason I decided to play it and what I found was somewhere close to hell embodied in a racing game.

Baja is an arcade racing game that centres around Baja racing, that is racing across wild rocky terrains and sandy desserts in Beach Buggies and trucks. It’s a standard racing game in that it has a career mode, custom races, online and a highly unnecessary free roam event.

The environments are really bland. The game was released in 2008 and once again, it shows its age with the brown, light brown and super brown colours. I get that this accurately represents the real-life environments that they actually race in but considering the racing itself is more arcade, they could have been a bit more creative here.

Now when I started Baja, I didn’t think I would be able to finish it because at the start, the racing is really hard. Just going off the bat on easy, it took me a while to figure out just how to win or even get close to winning. It turns out the trick is to use the clutch to gain traction and speed boosts and for those that naturally drive in manual transmission, I imagine this would have been easy but for me it was a massive adjustment. Against all my natural instructs, you have to not use the brakes unless you want to continually lose. The only way to corner is to feather the accelerator or, for the tighter corners, use the handbrake clutch coming out of it.

One thing about Baja though, is that it appears to know how difficult it is and there is some definite AI balancing in place. If you cock up massively and overdo a corner or roll, the AI appears to wait for you. This happens in every race except for the open class ones where you race against slow cars and they get head starts. Then the game wants you to lose and lose badly.

One of the quirks of some of the races that really annoyed me was that apparently, they don’t close any of the roads. When doing rallies you also have to compete with traffic. This is utterly ridiculous but I suppose it goes hand in hand with the fact you can nearly fully control your car in the air and that the AI doesn’t want you to lose 90% of the time.

Vehicle damage is another aspect of the game that doesn’t make sense. As you pick up damage, it affects the performance of your car and you can repair the car at certain pit locations during the races but the oil never seems to fix itself and the warning light comes back on almost immediately after you leave the pit. I gave up trying to work out the logic for this in the end.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Not a lot of people have completed this game and there are two reasons for this. The first is that online racing puts off a lot of people, however that’s not too much of an issue for Baja because you don’t need other people to actually complete the online achievement. You just have to be in an active race, solo, for 5 hours.

The second stage of going for the completion involves completing the career mode and this actually gets progressively easier the more it goes on. I don’t know if this is to do with me progressively getting better at the game or the fact that the faster vehicles are easier to use. But what’s really annoying is the fact that upgrading your vehicles doesn’t give you any advantage whatsoever and actually makes it harder to win the races.

I later found out that only applying certain upgrades provides some help but this isn’t needed once you get the hang of the game. Along the way through career mode, you’ll net achievements for unlocking each class. You will also need to win 5 invitational events and these are hard to see come up as you need to be in the outer menu to enter them. It’s also a pain because there’s no tracking for the individual events so you don’t know which ones you’ve done and which ones you haven’t.

It’s also necessary to get golds in all the career races and this is another error with the game in that the achievement descriptions are sometimes off. This one stated you needed to get gold in all the invitationals, which is simply ridiculous. But thankfully you don’t have to do them and it’s just the career races.

While we’re on misleading achievements, there are two achievements for driving 1,000 and 2,000 miles respectively. However, what’s not stated is that all of these miles have to be completed in career mode and despite the volume of races, it’s still not enough to get to 2,000 miles so grinding is required. It was the last achievement I unlocked.

Outside of career mode, there is a requirement to win all races with 5 laps against 5 AI opponents. What’s frustrating about this is there are loads of races that don’t meet this criteria in career mode so they need to be done again in solo play.

There is also a massively redundant free roam mode and an achievement tied to it for finding 5 strange locations in each of the maps. It takes an inordinate amount of time to complete as all the maps are so ball-numbingly generic and there is no map so navigating these is nigh on impossible.

Once all this is done, there are a few miscellaneous pieces to do, all bar one of which might be completed through normal gameplay. The one that won’t is for winning a race in manual transmission so unless you are a gear changing savant, the way to do is to select one of the shorter tracks, stick it in second gear and leave it there. With a trophy truck, it’s actually quite easy to win.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Baja: Edge of Control, for me, is another step towards completing all racing games I own. It’s a bit backwards in that it’s difficult to learn and easy to master, but this makes it a rewarding completion. That’s if you can stomach the dated and unimaginative graphics and the grindathon races.