If you don't love the great outdoors, you probably aren't a great candidate to enjoy Baja: Edge of Control. This is a game that features some rugged, beautiful terrain from locations like Cabo San Lucas, Mexico and Lake Powell, USA. Not having been to Cabo, I can't speak to the accuracy of this depiction, but it isn't like some street-racing title where you need to see familiar corners and landmarks. The only landmarks you'll need in Baja: Edge of Control are the dirty humps of track, sandy berms, and boulders. The fine touches in each environment are sharply in focus and realistic, from waving grass and saguaro cacti to heartbreakingly blue skies. There could have been a bit more dust and dirt coming off the tracks for the sake of realism, but the graphics overall are excellent. There are a slew of special features in the game that showcase "making of" video and footage from the creation of Baja: Edge of Control.

It is during a video early into the game that you'll see how the developers were able to include such realistic racing noise. Seeing a high-performance, off-road racing vehicle strapped into a frame and revved up for the purpose of recording its engine at different RPMs shows the dedication this development team had for their subject matter. The resulting sound design is awesome and really makes it fun to play Baja: Edge of Control with the volume turned up. There are settings that can be tweaked to increase or decrease your engine noise, the noise your competitors' engines make along the track, and the music. Default settings for music are rather low, as if the developers knew that many of us prefer the whine of an engine to some juiced rock tune. In all fairness, the music included with the game is sufficiently amped up to match the wild and hairy feeling you'll have racing. The sound of rock and scree sliding around the track as you slide or brake, and the hum of another vehicle creeping up behind you are the sounds you'll most likely retain after playing Baja: Edge of Control, rather than the music.

Racing games can be challenging without managing to be fun, depending on your personal style. The niche gamers that like racing simulations are out there, along with plenty of arcade racing fans. Baja: Edge of Control falls between the two extremes, but walks the thin line suggested in its title. Many people will find the experience of racing these off-road tracks completely out of control. The truth is that the entry vehicle class is a gauntlet. Pass through successfully and you'll find subsequent classes that control better, vastly improving the racing experience. Even with the best vehicle, there are some unique qualities to racing off-road; before you chalk anything up to design flaws, go try riding your bicycle through the sand. The vehicles provided are a nice mix of gimmicky mini-cars, racing powerhouses like the Trophy Truck, and staple cars like the Unlimited VW or Baja Bug. It's too bad that motorcycles weren't featured, since they certainly play a role in the traditional Baja race. The Open Class races offer a simulation of having other vehicles racing alongside you, but not with motorcycles included.

The "Baja" referenced in Baja: Edge of Control is the Baja 1000, a yearly tradition since 1962 in the Baja peninsula of California's lower edge, technically part of Mexico. This race may not be the event you start with since it can take hours to complete and is the most grueling event in the game. The shorter course races are available from the beginning under Race Mode. Only environments you've unlocked through Baja Career Mode are playable, but once you unlock an environment, you can participate in all races it offers. Free Ride is a nice way to get the feel for how your vehicle handles and scout out track features. You can unlock achievements in Free Ride, and "discover" areas within each environment. The open world design aesthetic in Baja: Edge of Control is great, especially since everything you can see is drivable. At some point, you'll hit the edge of the environment, but it takes quite a bit of driving. Even within a single environment, there are lots of neat features and diversity. The actual racing, apart from Baja Race, takes several forms. Circuit Race is the most standard, with you in the driver's seat opposing a group of seven opponents through a series of laps. The Rally Race is a bit different because it mostly has you competing against the clock within your own class. Other vehicles above you by class may be on the track, but don't count against your final results. The Hill Climb Race is a wild mode that has tons of vertical action, both up and down. This mode might be compared to the more technical tracks of a rally race, since the process of scaling and descending a steep vertical track will play hell with your vehicle. The final race type is Open Class Challenge, where a mix of classes enter and are then given handicaps according to the power of each vehicle.

The Baja Career allows you to work through a series of races in a vehicle of your choosing, upgrading and tuning the thing as you wish along the way. It's all about the racing, so don't expect to be playing mini-games or driving through flaming rings anytime soon... Earning money and experience points from wins or at least placement in each race will allow you to choose higher-grade vehicles and move up from the Baja Bug (yes, that bug...) class to a Trophy Truck or other specialized truck. Sponsors will start showing an interest once you've developed your career, making for a nice payoff that you'll need if you ever hope to buy a Trophy Truck. If your precious vehicles get dinged up, you can make a pit stop or flag down a passing repair helicopter that will bring its flying mechanics to you. Handy! Getting online allows you to join both ranked matches and open play with a random player. Hosting a game is simple and allows you to select options that make the race easier or harder. The coolest thing available within the Baja: Edge of Control multiplayer offering is Panorama Mode. If you have (or can get) three XBox 360 consoles, three screens, and three copies of this game, you can use everything to simulate the view you'd have from your vehicle's cockpit, in "wraparound" style. This is a pretty lavish option given that setting it up requires at least $600 worth of console and twice that in television sets. Network or play online with up to 10 players, or go with a traditional multiplayer using split-screen for up to four players. This last option is the easiest way to get that multiplayer experience with friends, especially if you aren't set up yet to connect your console to the Web.

Okay, this is where we get real for a minute, kids. Baja: Edge of Control will periodically make you shout and cry, but that's true of most marriages... and we still love our spouses, right? Trust us when we say that the payoff is there once you graduate from the Baja Bug class. Almost every aspect of handling, durability, and performance improves in the Unlimited VW class, and there are seven additional classes that just get better each time you qualify. The qualification for a new class is through dollars and experience earned after a race, where you can earn both for placing as low as fifth. The key is to keep practicing, but even with plenty of practice, you'll find some very slippery physics in most of the environments. Whether all the reactions to the roads' surfaces stem from accurate physics would take a physics professor and professional game developer to know, so suffice it to say that Baja: Edge of Control drives more like an arcade game than a simulation game. This means you'll have the chance to recover from fender-benders and slight crashes that would probably take a real vehicle out of the race. Another payoff is that you don't have to practice 100 hours to place first in the Baja Bug league, since off-road shortcuts and skillful, aggressive driving will generally win the day. Aggressive is the word for your opponents, who will ram your tail and blow by you, severely disrupting your progress. The bumping stuff is where you'll really get annoyed, but it is a function of being at the tail end of the pack. Once you stick behind the third-place racer, you'll find that jockeying for position isn't quite as hectic, but if you get stuck in the bottom three, it's generally quite a dogfight. Baja: Edge of Control is perfect for racing fans that are ready for real time commitment, and the payoff comes in achievements and unlockable content, not to mention the chance to virtually own a trophy truck some day.

Although the main event is leaning more toward an arcade feel, you wouldn't know it to visit the Baja: Edge of Control garage. In this section, you can upgrade most aspects of your vehicle or tune installed equipment. A wide range of parts and settings can be changed, from the power-train to tires and even weight/drag. Upgrades cost money, and it appeared from our experiments that upgrading indiscriminately can cause more problems than it fixes. An example would be boosting horsepower without corresponding upgrades in braking and tire quality. Going faster is great... until you have to stop! The more well-rounded strategy of upgrading gradually will produce good results and allow you to get through events in each class, earning the money and experience needed to purchase vehicles in the next class. The garage isn't just about parts, though. Tuning equipment is a way for knowledgeable folks to gain some competitive edge or customize vehicles to their racing style. Each setting is well documented, which helps provide some idiot proofing, but you can still get yourself in a lot of trouble. Examples would be adjusting the gear ratios so that you have the world's greatest accelerating car that has crappy top speed. You can also make changes in the vehicle's suspension and braking that dramatically change performance on the track. A test drive feature allows you to test settings, but there aren't any presets available other than the default setting. One purpose for this tuning, apart from personal preference, is to modify a vehicle for a specific purpose. Since there are multiple races of the same type, in different environments, it might have been nice to have the ideal settings for a Hill Climb race dialed right into the interface.

Baja: Edge of Control will make off-road racing fans very happy, with deep controls and equally deep environments. The variety of tracks, surfaces, and vehicles is matched by the many racing modes and extensive multiplayer featured here. Extras contained on the game disk make this feel like the Director's Cut of a DVD release... There is an exhilaration that comes from playing Baja: Edge of Control that isn't matched by many racing games, on- or off-road. Baja: Edge of Control does sometimes feel like it has crossed the line to out-of-control, but the nod to more core gamers in the garage is a nice touch. We can overlook the omission of motorcycles, as long as they make it into the next iteration, but we'll give Baja: Edge of Control major props since we couldn't find anything else missing in this release.