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Visiting Hawaii just became affordable even for the most cost-conscious gamers. Test Drive Unlimited takes the entire island of Oahu and tosses you into a world of expensive cars and ambitious drivers. What makes Test Drive Unlimited different is that many of these opponents are real life people. Atari reckons that this is the first time something like this has been done and is calling Test Drive Unlimited the first M.M.O.R: Massively Open Online Racing.
You begin the game by picking the character you want to play as. Before you know it you get a sweet Hawaiian house and an expensive car to match it. The game doesn’t have a complicated storyline (or anything resembling a storyline, really) but there are many objectives ranging from delivery missions, speed challenges, time trials and of course, races.
As expected in the delivery missions, you’ll be delivering certain packages to sometimes shady individuals on the island, escort a model home, or help a hitchhiker get to his or her destination. In the speed challenge, you’ll be tasked with either reaching a certain speed in a set amount of time or passing through speed traps scattered around with a minimum speed. The time trial and typical races are fairly standard. Completing missions gives you cash.
You need this cash to buy one of the over 90 licensed vehicles in the game. These range from Chevrolets and Volkswagen to more interesting cars like Ferraris and Lamborghinis. The car mechanics in the game are great. The handling is fairly realistic though be warned that the game definitely learns to the arcade side of things. Aside from buying cars, you can also buy upgrades, houses and even clothes for your character. Atari has made it clear that it expects to offer additional content on the Xbox Live Marketplace as well. Aside from the pure fun in collecting things, you’ll need at least in car in each of the classes for the various missions as well as houses to store these new cars. If you don’t have a particular car though, you don’t have to worry since the island includes rental agencies.
As mentioned above, the game literally includes nearly every inch of the island of Oahu. Part of the fun in these free roaming games is exploring the territory that you’re given. Test Drive Unlimited does this in an especially effective manor since it forces you to drive through each road at least once to add it to your repertoire of available routes. Once you have driven through a road once, and a mission appears anywhere on it, you can select it from the map and be taken there instantly. But you have had to driven on it first. As you drive around, you’ll see icons to begin objectives or you can view them from your map.
Of course, a huge portion of Test Drive Unlimited is the online portion. The game’s online gameplay is very ambitious. You can sell and buy cars online, create custom races including setting entrance fee, prizes and other details, as well as participate in online races. The races appear just like objectives do in the singleplayer portion of the game. You can participate in both ranked and unranked matches. If you don’t want to race, you can invite another person to take a stroll down the island with you. If you see any human players racing around, you can challenge them to a race at any given time. The game’s online portion isn’t quite unlimited since Atari limits the number of human players that you can see at any given time making it harder to find a specific person you want to race again. You can, however, work around this by joining a club with specific people you want to race again. It’s obvious that they did this because it would be impossible to race in Oahu if there were tens of thousands of players running around, though.
Test Drive Unlimited ‘s visuals are very impressive. Part of the game’s charm is taking really expensive cars down for a cruise in some of the most stunning locales that the United States can offer and the game does this very well. The island is meticulously rendered making you really feel like you’re driving around Hawaii. The environments look great when you’re standing still but thanks to advanced motion blur technology, they look even better when you’re taking corners at 100 mph. The game’s licensed vehicles are amazing, looking just like they would if you walked up and bought a brand new one. Though there is no damage done to the licensed cars, you can damage the generic cars that the AI drives. That said, Test Drive Unlimited is very ambitious and sometimes has technical difficulties. The frame rate drops for a few seconds every so often, there are some decidedly low-resolution textures at times, and it’s possible to drive too fast to the point where the game hasn’t yet loaded the part of the island that you’re in.
The game’s audio isn’t quite as impressive. The voice acting is nothing stellar and some of them feature flat acting. The sound effects are fairly good but nothing memorable. The soundtrack is fitting but comprised of smaller bands. You’ll definitely throw a custom soundtrack while playing this.
Test Drive Unlimited succeeds in reasonably blending the single- and multi-player experiences into one cohesive package. The game includes a lot of missions, cars, real estate and just about everything you can think of. With more coming stuff from the Xbox Live Marketplace, thus ensuring that you’ll be hooked for a bit longer, it’s easy to overlook the game’s flaws. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Sep 25, 2006
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