There are quite a few off-road racing games on the Dreamcast, with rally and baja-style scrambling featured in the likes of Sega Rally 2, Buggy Heat and 4 Wheel Thunder. The one thing all of those games have in common though (apart from the hills and the mud), is that they're primarily arcade racers. Bright, brash and unashamedly unrealistic in terms of vehicle handling and physics, they present an idealised version of racing through the wilderness and power sliding through turns. One entry in the Dreamcast library goes in the complete opposite direction though, instead positioning itself as a more real-world approximation of the sport of ploughing huge vehicles through forests and across sand dunes: 4x4 Evolution.
4x4 Evolution (or 4x4 EVO as it sometimes refers to itself) is a racing game stuffed to the gills with real-world licensed trucks and SUVs from a plethora of manufacturers, all of which can be driven to the very limits through a range of different environments. Interestingly, it also represents one of the only games on the Dreamcast where online multiplayer races could be held between console and PC gamers. Indeed, in it's heyday 4x4 Evolution had a burgeoning online scene, and was one of the few Dreamcast games that was still played extensively online. Sadly, this is no longer the case and using
this guide over at Dreamcast-Talk and the dial-up connection
detailed in my recent article here, I was able to log on to the servers but there were no other players in any of the lobbies. In 2017, it doesn't appear that many people are still playing 4x4 Evolution online with their Dreamcasts, but that's not to say the game isn't worth playing offline - it totally is. Furthermore, there's a fantastic website dedicated to everything you could possibly want to know about the online side of 4x4 Evolution, so if this is your bag head over to the
4x4 Evolution Revival Project here.
Developed by Terminal Reality and released in October 2000, 4x4 Evolution is a US exclusive with an emphasis on big trucks being driven at speed through big environments. The fact that it was never released in other territories outside the USA is an interesting footnote, as the game was advertised as coming to PAL regions and was featured on 'coming soon' pamphlets inside other games. You can see an example of the PAL box art in
this article at Sega Retro, so quite why the game wasn't localised is something of a mystery. In any case, the fact remains that 4x4 Evolution never saw a release outside of the US and due to this many people may never even have heard of it, which is a shame because it's probably one of the best Dreamcast racers you've never played...
