It’s easy to dismiss subtitles as inconsequential rhetoric, but in Baja’s case, THQ could scarcely have chosen a better slogan to sum up the experience at its core. Baja is as much about anticipating vehicles’ airborne behaviour as it is managing the vagaries of terra firma, and with so much time spent in the air – and at the whim of dead weight and momentum – ‘Edge Of Control’ seems unusually apt. Sadly, despite tactile handling and largely plausible surface physics, Baja feels insubstantial as a complete package.

Visually, the game is stunted by its own ambition. In order to represent the famed Baja endurance races with anything approaching authenticity, this is, by necessity, an open-world racer. This combination of acres of land and mammoth draw distances has taken a severe toll on fidelity: tracks are vast expanses of barren scrub, with few landmarks to anchor the player in the world or help differentiate one environment from another. With some of the point-to-point events lasting three hours at a minimum, divided into 20-minute legs, players are in danger of slipping in to a meditative trance from sustained focus on the undulating, serpentine ribbon of dirt that their vehicle consumes. Hypnotic, perhaps, but not especially compelling. Worse, with no opportunity to save between sections, the entire rally must be completed in a single sitting.

Such repetitive scenery provides little motivation to endure a simplistic, bare-bones career mode. Nor does the sheer difficulty curve, which bats newcomers away with utterly merciless AI competition even in the initial leagues, and little in the way of advice. Baja’s offroad racers are satisfying once the narrow boundaries of that titular, knife-edge balance have been established, but the learning process can be a torrid parade of shattered suspension and crumpled panels.

Ultimately, the visceral pleasure of the driving model, and the accompanying selection of stentorian engine notes, isn’t enough to maintain interest in the face of the featureless expanses that players are given to negotiate. Codemasters would do well to take note: it’s not the size of your world that counts, it’s what you’re capable of filling it with.

5/10