What would happen if you crossed a rally game with The Oregon Trail? Well, you’d get something similar to Desert Race Adventures. This is a roguelike choices-matter strategy game that doesn’t let the player drive directly. Instead, you’ll be managing resources to survive a desert rally (don’t call it Dakar) and ensure your driver and co-driver stay alive and the car keeps going! It is a unique set-up, but it does come with some design limitations.
Each run is unique and there are no upgrades or carryovers. Indeed, each run is procedurally generated, so you’ll never know what will be thrown your way. This is both a blessing and a curse, as you’ll see later on. First of all, you’ll need to pick from three drivers and three co-drivers. Each person comes with two randomly assigned pros and cons, such as saving or using more fuel or food, or gaining more or less damage, health, or fatigue. These are the five stats you’ll be managing constantly across the entire game, and you’ll be able to use up to three slots on your car to store resources to help you manage them. Add spare parts for repairs, food for replenishment, a medical kit for first aid, or perhaps a car tow kit to negate the negative impact of a random event. There is an interesting twist to resources. They all have different weights, and weight slows your total top speed and maximum daily distance you can travel. You could risk not filling up, but do you have enough fuel to survive? Choices, choices.
From here, you hit the road, and can choose to drive at slow, medium, or fast speed. Each speed churns through more food and fuel as you increase it, but then in theory you’ll reach your next checkpoint city faster. Run out of fuel or food, and it’ll be game over quickly. Faster driving causes more risk of car damage, so if you have any spare parts, you can try to repair on the fly. As day turns to night, a random event or two will trigger. The player seemingly has almost no say in what is triggered at all, and the outcomes are either self-selecting the best option and trying your luck or accepting your fate and adjusting your speed and resources. A shortcut may appear, which could mean you’ll cover more ground on the day, but there’s a large chance you’ll get lost, which means you’ll cover less ground and have fatigued drivers. A more fatigued driver is more prone to crashing, which brings damage and health issues, and so the spiral begins. Most of the choices are structured like this, with ladders of consequences. This continues until you reach a city checkpoint, at which point you can choose to rest, repair, or visit the store for replenishing resources. You do have the option to rest on the road and lose a day, and it’s worth noting that the amount of fuel, food, and fatigue spent is more than double each time you increase speed. Desert Race Adventures is all about risk.
There are two issues with this setup, which continues until you either reach the end of the rally and get a score for the online leaderboard or you conk out and fail. There is no player feedback loop for the procedural generation of the rally events. Sometimes it just forces multiple crashes with fresh drivers, sometimes a sandstorm appears multiple times in a row and drags you down. Cars randomly start failing all the time, so you’ll almost always need spare parts. Most of the events are negative, so you’ll end up driving slower with fatigued drivers, which forces you to take fuel most of the time, too. The other resources can only negate one bad event, so it ends up being a complete luck of the draw as to whether you do well. I didn’t feel like I planned better whenever I finished a rally and scored well. I just had a luckier match of resources and events. Whilst I was entertained, I didn’t feel connected to my actions and their consequences, and that’s because the mystical cloak that generates them covers all.
As everything is random, it also means the online leaderboard doesn’t scratch the itch either. Everyone has had a totally different experience, with different drivers and settings. My suggestion is to run weekly seeded events so that everyone is battling the same elements. It would make the online competition meaningful.
Whilst the pixel art is superb, and the premise is intriguing, Desert Race Adventures didn’t really connect for me. Some more variation of events, a bit of visibility to understand your actions and outputs, and seeded events would go a long way to pull all these ideas together into something more compelling. That said, if you like The Oregon Trail and stat bar management, this is 95% of the game, and you’ll be right at home.
Review copy provided by the developer. Desert Race Adventures is out now.
Higher Plain Games is part of the Higher Plain Network. If you like what I do, please consider supporting me via Patreon for as little as $1/£1 a month. There are additional perks for supporting me, such as behind-the-scenes content and downloads. You can also share the website or use the affiliate buy now links on reviews. Buying credit from CD Keys using my affiliate link means I get a couple of pence per sale. All your support will enable me to produce better content, more often. Thank you.
