Right ... where do I start with this game ? well lets look at the sole positive of this game for me , I like the game is presented. Good enough detail on the vehicles and nice scenery and dirt gets on the vehicles which is good to see an attention to detail I guess.
Now I said I like the graphics but the game is 130km square which sounds all well and good ... that is quite an area , I've been away on holiday on distances further than 130km away but it is all fairly similar and it is a little boring going through 130km square of a of copy/paste scenery. I have only been to the first 2 areas , but I have been informed by someone who has completed the game that all the other areas are pretty much all the same.
Secondly the difficulty curve of the game is a little harsh due to offroad nature of some of the tracks you can stick to the tracks but if you slightly cut a corner a checkpoint is on the game will massively punish you for it and it is not hard to miss a corner by a fair bit as all the vehicles slide massively like there are oil slicks on the road at the slightest provocation and on the hardest difficulty the AI will actively ram you like they want you off the track. This can be rather amusingly fixed by a vehicle selection bug which can let you take a truck to a bike race and have revenge.
Thirdly the open world thing with racing games with all the racing games I've played with it on (namely this and burnout paradise) have had issues , burnout had long boring drives to races and getting lost and I can report the issues I had with burnout I had alot worse with fuel even to the point of the game's guidance system telling me to drive directly into thew water.
Also if you are looking for quick achievements from this game don't bother it's one of them games with alot of little pointed achievements that can be awkward to get , but it only goes to prove just how massive game is. So overall if you want a game that you can throw massive amounts of time at doing pretty much the same thing over and over knock yourself out ... but beware of the repetitiveness , the sadistic cheating AI and a Sat Nav Guidance system that drives like it was programmed by Mr Bean.
