“Burn rubber in Pearl Harbor”
Ever wanted to visit Hawaii but just couldn’t scrounge the cash to afford it? Here’s your chance. For a dream price of only $40, you can get a flight to perfectly recreated Oahu, over 1000 miles to scour in the tons of dream cars and motorcycles at your disposal. Not to mention your ability to buy amazing mansions on this beautiful island.
There’s a small, small story to follow. It’s a whole two scenes big, give or take. You choose your avatar, male or female, from a moderately sized list of characters. After choosing your character, you’re on your way to Oahu. After exiting the terminal, you can rent a car of your choice at the car rental dealer and drive to purchase a car at a starting dealer (Chevy and Audi), and then drive your newly purchased car to the Real Estate agency. Buy your first house and you’re on your way to making a name for yourself as an eccentric, multi-millionaire tycoon who races exotic cars for a living.
The audio in TDU is decent. The cars sound good, especially my lovely Pagani Zonda. Really, it’s just what you expect from a game like this. Good sounding vehicles with bad sounding crashes that don’t do any damage to your vehicle. What really kills the audio are the radio stations in the game. They are simply terrible. Not one song is worth listening to. Luckily, with the 360's ability to make custom song playlists in any game, this isn’t such a huge problem. Still makes you wonder why developers would include those songs, you know, the ones that make your ears bleed.
Graphics in Test Drive Unlimited are actually quite nice. The cars and bikes look superb and identical to their real life counterparts. The details are really nice in the vehicles, but there is no customization in the game, you only purchase performance kits, which is pretty boring. The paint jobs are nice, especially the chameleon paints you can use. My Lotus Espirit is one sexy piece of British machinery, all green and blue. The island itself looks amazing, as do the roads. The environments in TDU look awesome, too bad there are two models for trees and bushes when you go off-roading. Oh, and the character models look awful. I mean, like, wow. They look terrible. There is a small character creation guide in your house, but doesn’t seem to offer much. You can purchase clothes for your avatar, but the character models look so terrible, you won’t want him to get out of his car.
The way TDU plays out is decent also. Accelerate with the right trigger, brake with the left trigger. Normal racing controls for this title. There is only single player on the game, no offline multi. In fact, the game is always online if you have Live. As you are driving on the thousands of miles in Hawaii, you may come across another person just cruising along his merry way. Aside from cruising along with up to 8 people at once on this huge island (why didn’t they let it support a higher amount?), you can do challenges. These can be circuit races, point to point races, time attack races, and speed challenge races. You should be familiar with the first three, but the last one, maybe not. In speed challenge races, you go as fast as you can and go past a high speed camera. Go through all the cameras and get a high enough total speed to win the gold cup! Sound fun? Not really, it’s my least favorite challenge, aside from the abstract challenges. The abstract challenges can be driving hitch-hikers, models, or cargo from point A to point B while taking as little damage as possible. Needless to say, these are HARD. Amazingly difficult. Sustain enough damage and the challenge is over, but you can always retry. While we’re on the difficulty of the challenges, let’s talk about the police. The police are hard to avoid. Especially if they are in full force (3 shields). You get half a shield if you hit a car and then the police are on your tail. If the police ram your car, which will happen, you gain another half shield. The police are very fast and spawn in front of you all the time. If you get pulled over, you get charged an outrageous fine, and if you can’t pay it, you go to jail. Don’t drop the soap.
Multi is the same as single player. You set up your own challenges, take on someone else’s challenges, or instant challenge someone. If you are driving around and see an orange icon, that is a multiplayer challenge. Enter it and you can begin a matchmaking type thing, select your car and let the list fill up. At any time, start the race and have some fun with some real people. Instant challenges are when you are cruising around and you hit the A button, which flashes your high-beams at your opponent. If they accept, you select a point on the map, you show up at a starting line, and gun it as fast as you can to that point. You can even select and burn rubber in Pearl Harbor!
The replay value is pretty good. Like all racing games, the gamer decides just how long he or she wants to play. With a lot of different cars and bikes to purchase, a large list of achievements to shoot for, tons of roads to drive on, and new content to download, TDU should be worth playing for a long time.
This game only retails for $40, which isn’t a lot by comparison to the other new games that come out for Xbox 360. I recommend renting Test Drive Unlimited first to give it a try before you take the plunge.
By DemoSquared
View Comments (1) :: Post Comment
