Ford Racing Off Road

Off Road (known as Ford Racing Off Road in North America) is a 2008 racing game developed by Razorworks and distributed by Xplosiv in Europe and Empire Interactive in North America. It is the seventh and final installment in the Ford Racing series. It is also the only game in the series to feature Land Rover cars, which were owned by Ford Motor Company at the time. The game was made available for Microsoft Windows, the PlayStation 2, the PlayStation Portable, and the Wii. The majority of the reviews for the game were mostly unfavorable.

Why It Should be Taken Off the Road

 * 1) Rubber band and aggressive AI where opponents drive faster than you, especially in the later races.
 * 2) Sluggish vehicle handling, especially with some trucks such as the 2008 Ford F-250 Super Duty and 2008 Ford F-350.
 * 3) Speaking of trucks, there are only 19 of them, mostly contemporary Ford and Land Rover vehicles of 2008 and some concepts from both brands.
 * 4) * What makes this more pathetic, and insulting is developers ignored an already existing array of off-road vehicles which featured in Ford Racing 3 and was more diverse and solid than what Off Road had. In FR3, there were classic trucks like 1956 & 1965 F-100, rally cars like Focus, RS200 and Escort RS2000 and Ford EX concept. Land Rover also strangely lacks Range Rover Vogue.
 * 5) ** Among those vehicles, the RS200 was also planned to be included in this game but scrapped for some reason.
 * 6) Despite being released on the PS2, the graphics look like an earlier PS2 game.
 * 7) Pathetic physics. The vehicles don't even dirt compared to many rally games or any game where you can drive in irregular roads in where cars actually can be dirty.
 * 8) Lazy damage model.
 * 9) Massive difficulty increase. Aside from the aggressive rivals, the bad handling, and the fact that the first position is critical to progressing throughout the game, this makes some game types more difficult. Here are several examples:
 * 10) * Gold Rush: The goal is to gather the coins scattered throughout the course and win the race. The problem is that you're forced to drive through the coins close to the walls with opponents tailing you, putting you in danger of being caught, or through shortcuts where opponents destroy you as well. If you don't gather enough coins, you lose even if you're in first place.
 * 11) * Damage Control: The goal is to win the race while staying within the damage limit. The problem is that when you use vehicles with poor handling and combine them with aggressive AI, you end up in a world of agony.
 * 12) * Expedition: This was the series' poorest game mode. The goal is to acquire all five artifacts scattered along the course. The far worst problem is that the placements of the artifacts change every time you restart, making it extremely luck-based, particularly in the second one, which unlocks the 2007 Land-Rover Discovery [L319].
 * 13) Few selections of tracks.
 * 14) Generic music.
 * 15) The game effectively ended the franchise. Razorworks and Empire Interactive, on the other hand, perished along with the series.
 * 16) Even if you complete the last event from both Career and Tournament, the game won't show the credits despite the game being extremely harder.

Trivia

 * Ford Racing Off Road is the last game in a series, where the Ford brand was the main focus, which started in 1987 with Ford Simulator series of games. However, none of the Ford Simulator games were developed by Empire Interactive, its development was handled by The Soft Ad Group Inc., plus Ford Simulator games were freeware/shareware and published by Ford Motor Company themselves.
 * Some vehicles (for example: the 2006 Ford F-250 Super Chief, or even the 2002 Ford Mighty F-350), make its first ever (or even only) game debuts in this game.