JD's Gaming Blog: December 2011

Also Known As: TestDrive Unlimited 2, TDU2: Test Drive Unlimited
Also on: PS3, X360
Genre: Racing
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Eden Games

Hello again everyone it’s time for another spiel and this time it’s the next installment of my favorite driving game series ever. The title comment for this review comes from the CVG.com review I read of the first Test Drive Unlimited (TDU) it was immensely funny reading it at first as it was quite true, it was the essence of what the first Test Drive was, pretty much all about cars (and bikes) and I ask myself, has much changed? I guess not, after all Test Drive unlimited is a racing game, and a racing game has cars but this time other features have been made more accessible, but just barely.

I will start with a brief review of the first Test Drive Unlimited which I had the pleasure of playing through multiple times, I first came to read about the game when I was looking to entertain myself with a new driving game. The last one I had played was Need for Speed Carbon which was the second last of the underground car modifying subseries of EA’s Need for Speed (NFS) line of products being released, the last being Undercover which quite frankly I didn’t even notice. So when Shift rolled its way out into the third generation of consoles with its real-life tracks and legal races I decided I’d need to get a (semi) realistic racer that I could get into, I’d been a fan of NFS Hot Pursuit 2 which was an earlier incantation of semi-street racing on large tracks with sports and supercars back in 2002 but I wanted to get away from the NFS series. The other thing I wanted to get into was getting online in a driving game especially in an open-world environment with a bit of multiplayer racing thrown in there as well and Test Drive Unlimited looked the way to go.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2: Beautiful looking for the time and functional

The first test drive unlimited shined in its graphical quality, giant open world, customization of avatar and selection of vehicles which includes dozens of cars and sports bikes. I had great fun buying cars of different classes and racing them in events all across the island which as well as normal and knockout races included things like taking models to their photo shoot, car delivery and believe it or not, drug delivery. As well as that you could buy clothes and houses to store your growing collection of cars and bikes. It faltered with its online aspect which was possibly the worst multiplayer system in any recent game I have experienced, the flaming hoops you had to jump through in order to get any kind of multiplayer event organized was ridiculous, at the time I was playing there wasn’t much multiplayer races going on, probably because they were so hard to manage that a lot of people didn’t bother with them entirely. Another very annoying problem was that the friend system was appalling. It was so hard to do the simplest things like marking someone as a friend and even harder to work out who was your friend and whether they were online plus the people who were around you seemed totally random all the time, I tried to meet up with a friend who played the game too and we organized to drive to the same place in the game world but we couldn’t see each other. There was next to no multiplayer interface and you could only chat to people nearest to you with no chatbox and no other chatting tools i.e. whispering which I think is the most basic thing you need for any kind of open world multiplayer.

Test Drive Unlimited 1: Cars and bikes

It was clear there was a fair amount of improvements to be made on the multiplayer front, but as far as the singleplayer aspect went it was well worthwhile. So when I heard that a sequel was in the works a lot of people had quite high expectations of an improved multiplayer system, as did I to a degree, but somehow I knew that it was only going to be mildly better. I bought Test Drive Unlimited 2 (TDU2) for PC namely because I wanted to focus on online playing and to be honest I would rather rely on typing then talking and trying to hear people through your speakers and/or headset, though now I kind of wish I had bought it for console because the chat system in the game is pretty much exactly the same as the first one. There’s only one chat channel when you’re in the open world and it’s only for people relatively close to you, this changes in the multiplayer matches of course and you can talk to your friends, but I really I found myself just wanting to use the Steam overlay (which doesn’t work by the way cause I didn’t buy the game through Steam) to talk to friends or just playing in a window. You are able to join a ‘club’ (kind of like a racing version of a guild) but I’m unsure of whether this has a‘club chat’ option.

I’d hate to use World of Warcraft as an explanation of how things should work, these games are both old and new but still have great ways of communication, WoW is held up by its mouse related interface of course but it’s a testament to the tools we should have to communicate with each other for example things like a search to see who’s online at the moment, the ability to speak to the one person (aka whispering) the ability to invite others to a group and only speak to the people in that group and/or guild and most importantly have a chat channel which everyone can talk in. The lack of these things make the online world a hollow experience, and of course you could argue that WoW has been out for a very long time and is much more popular and that’s true but there’s no reason why they could not learn from this. Minecraft which is in its earlier stages is an example which has been massively enhanced with hundreds of modifications by a very large community allowing all kinds of chat options as well as tools for playing the game. There’s a reason that these two games either have great text-based communication options already or have good ones added by a modding community , it’s because they were both made specifically for computers and are very popular games with very large fan bases. Test Drive Unlimited 2 sadly is and has neither of those things, this is one of the things I have realized then dealt with pretty much from when I started playing the game and what a lot of people (namely these few) were afraid of and that is the PC version of TDU2 is pretty much a direct port from the xbox360 version. This is mainly noticeable in the interface as the coloured buttons are the shapes of the xbox system controller and the menu system doesn’t have enough functionality and the whole thing have this big and clumsy feel to it, especially when trying to use the mouse to move around, the icons on the main map are way too big as well cluttering it up but it’s functional to some degree.

Notice the XBOX360 (and possibly PS3) resemblant coloured buttons?

Though I digress, I’ve never really played a MMO style Racer so I really don’t know what’s good and what’s not and I guess comparing it to a third-person long standing MMO really isn’t fair, also another problem that hinders multiplayer is that there it seems there is quite a lot of people from non-english speaking countries so there’s both lag and the language barrier. I feel I shouldn’t complain as I always see a decent of people playing TD2 when I come online but it’s still so hard to find random multiplayer matches, I could honestly not remember how many times I’ve seen a visual ‘occupied with players’ flashing ring around an event in the world only to find that there are no players playing in it, I just want to scream “just give me a list of every single multiplayer race going on both islands whether it’s ranked or not with some decent filters i.e. race type, players, not empty, not full, ping etc!!!” then I realize it’s kind of a long and complicated statement to scream out. Maybe because the first game’s multiplayer system was so terrible that it’s going to take them awhile to get things up to scratch, hopefully that’s by TDU let’s say‘4’ (that’s a good number) there’s actually a solid PC multiplayer system of course my wishful thinking never really rewarded me much in life.

Multiplayer lobby with people in: I don't get to this stage much but it's fun when I do

Well now that I’ve got that off my chest, and believe me I do apologise for those 4-5 paragraphs about me complaining about the multiplayer and interface. I will continue now with something I enjoy about test drive, the actual cars and the driving. Believe me I for one aren’t the best sports car driver in games or in real life, I have never driven very fast for an extended period of time, but I have a decent amount of mildly realistic car game experience, while nowhere near the kind of stuff you need to do any good at the likes of Gran Turismo 5 or Forza Motorsport. I play driving games with my old Logitech Rumblepad 2 which is basically a PS2 Dualshock controller for the PC so I use the joysticks to steer and accelerate/brake instead of the bumpers that the PS3 controllers have, but it still works well enough. I’m slightly ashamed to say I play the game on the middle road “sport” setting of the driving assistance. In my defense I did try the higher level (hardcore) but could not handle the more powerful cars as I was pretty much permanently with no grip cause of the huge amount of torque and besides there’s only 3 levels anyway (the other being “full assistance”). So that’s that I may not be great a virtual driver but Test drive makes it fun no matter what skill you are and soon you’ll be cornering and hitting those gear shifts like a pro, and yes even with automatic transmission you still can’t just floor the accelerator, unless you want to do a burnout that is.

At the next intersection, turn left

And now for the cars, the cars are obviously a big part of Test Drive as before they are divided into classes of type and engine power (roughly) the car types are Asphalt (A), Off-road (B) and Classic (C) each type having a range of tiers A1 to A7 etc and annoying to some people you have to do pass a couple of trials to acquire the license to drive every single one of them, but I don’t mind, the tests are pretty helpful. Type C and B only have 2 classes though and this makes the A class seem kind of an overhaul as it has much more cars than the others and the A7 and A6 tiers only have 3 and 4 cars respectively which doesn’t exactly give you much choice seeing as you have to get at least one . This is what gets you buying a lot of cars and a lot of houses to store them in (as you do) and the varying kinds of vehicles make it more interesting it’s great fun going from screeching around in a modern sports car to cruising in a 1950’s Cadillac, even more so is the new off-road tracks and cars that just about makes the game worth playing by themselves, there’s something very non-realistic (and environmentally baneful) about roaring down a woodland path at 200kms an hour in a huge SUV but oh man is it fun. Another big point about test drive is the various camera views you can use both while driving and in the replay mode, and what’s more you can use your controller’s D-pad (or appropriate keys of whatever you are using) to look around the car in outside view or with your head in the interior view. TDU has always had very good interior detail, and it’s fun to watch your character steering and changing gears or just not looking at where you’re going for fun’s sake.

The garage/showroom in one of my houses, yes plural

The environment in test drive has improved a bit I would say, the new starting island Ibiza has very picturesque scenery with rolling fields, woodland forests and western style rocky mountain ranges with a bit of change in the environment compared to TDU1 which apart from the inner cities did not differ that much. Unfortunately though the graphics are reasonably good looking they do somewhat pale in comparison to the like of Forza and GT5, the cars and environment does look good, but not as good as they could so to speak though I like to think that their good in their own special way. There also has been the exciting addition of roundabouts which are a nice touch of realism but technically no-one apart from the traffic goes round them the right way and their a ripe spot for hooning players (just like in real life). As well as the new island with its new scenery and roundabouts you get pretty much the old game for free as the whole island of Oahu makes a return, the only difference being that there is now off-road tracks and you get there via a different airport and starting location, the layout and scenery in Hawaii are pretty much the same as before just given a bit of a touch-up but it’s good to have it there again, I’m especially fond of the way the edges of the road are very wide and don’t count towards ‘running off the road’ penalty which they have removed in Ibiza. There is also a new reason to do some exploring, various car wrecks of certain cars are scattered around the whole island and if you happen to drive near them your “car wreck radar”will start bleeping depending on how close you are (just like in Aliens) finding 10 of the same car wreck awards you with a new free car to add to your collection, tis a nice little fun activity to do that beaks up your usual everyday activity of driving really fast expensive cars with no regard for your own or others safety (well most of the time).

Tres magnifique

Unlike the previous game there is now a story mode where you start with that old cliche movie ‘dream sequence’ “where you’re a huge star then you wake up to reality and you’re really just a ordinary bloke with a shitty job” in this case it’s a valet driver and you end up joining this big racing championship for rich people which is the basis of the singleplayer mode. The different events coincide with the car and class types so there’s a C4 event and A6 event etc and for each type of car and about 5-6 events inside that inc normal race, time trial, eliminator (last man standing), speed limit which is basically:“keep above this speed without crashing for about 2 minutes” and checkpoint where you have to basically break the law by going through the speed cameras as fast as possible (hey, we’re rich and drive hugely expensive cars who gives a stuff?). Additionally to this there is a Championship every so often where you drive cars from various classes and types and all this is accompanied by various cutscenes of you and all the drivers and your‘rival’ for this particular event. In my opinion this storyline and cutscenes are basically fun to watch for all the wrong reasons. I usually go easy on cutscenes in games, unless they happen to cheesily replace them with a picture and text explanation of what’s happening (I’m looking at you Tenchu 3) but the cutscenes are made laughable at best due to the terrible and cheesy voice acting and the outdated and animatronic look of the human models, I enjoy a good storyline to break up the usual race-o-rama etc but frankly most people would not have the required attention span. Also there is all your usual random events such as giving attractive ladies a lift and some new ones including seeing how fast and crazy you can drive and tailing someone’s girlfriend to eventually find they are cheating on them, this always seems to be the same guy who gets you to do this, and judging by the amount of times this type of challenge appears he kind of has a serious woman problem.

This is about as animated as the character models get.

One of my favorite features of the first Test Drive was the huge amount of wealth you seemed to accumulate while doing nothing but racing cars (and bikes) and spending it on nothing but cars, bikes, clothes and houses of which were of no real use other than to store your increasingly large car collection. This is what makes Test Drive different from other racing games, in TDU2 you aspire to be some sort of cashed up celebrity racer with pretty much no regard for the safety of others or Hawaiian residents for that matter, with your incredulous wealth you can buy cars and upgrades, houses, clothes and even things like haircuts and cosmetic surgery (yep, it’s truly celebrity). One thing I have noticed however, is that through the Test Drive games the clothes have been somewhat ridiculous looking, and in TDU2 this is no exception for example, would you wear a blazer with a hoodie underneath? would you also wear a blazer with no shirt? would you wear bright shiny red tracksuit pants with the same colour high top shoes? Most (normal) people would not, so I suppose that the idea is to dress outlandishly like the crazy celeb you are supposed to be. Your house (or houses) is now slightly more interactive as you can now walk around inside them and access various things such as the TV or your laptop which give you access to various info including stats and game announcements, you can also now modify the interior of your house with different floor and walls, couches, dining tables and chairs which is a nice touch, not that you can actually sit in them (or the pool for that matter), but at least you can walk around and outside not to mention your cavernous garage where you can ogle your cars from every angle, even the interior. The actual customization of the cars is minimal, as this is no Need for Speed Underground, it is limited to tuner stores which have a pretty over-simplified way of upgrading your car for money and also a “sticker shop” where you can apply new car paint in various styles and/or decorate your car with a very limited graphics system.

Mah house, I like the 'island' feel

There has been one DLC (Downloadable Content Pack) so far for the game, this was the Exploration Pack which gave access to both new challenges and new “car wrecks” to find to acquire new cars as well as a few other much needed tweaks. To be honest though what I am waiting for is bikes, I very much enjoyed the motorcycles in the first test drive and now (halfway through my second attempt at the game) I find that they are going to be released in the next DLC packthat has been announced for release around February 2012. Though this isn’t all flowers and roses, there appears to only be 3 bikes two Ducati’s and one Harley Davidson, and there will only be new multiplayer not singleplayer challenges added for bikes. So whoop dee doo 3 bikes, though at least we actually do get a Harley style one I suppose, it seems that bikes were a thing that Eden Gamesnever meant to put in and are just giving bike fans (like me) something to make us shut up. So in retrospect I really shouldn’t complain, I can at least ride bikes soon, but due to all the restrictions on the singleplayer races (and the removal of the no class requirement races) it doesn’t look like I’ll be using the bikes in the singleplayer races at all. Also I sincerely hope the new cars that come with the pack will fill up the A classes with not many cars too choose from, though I doubt it as they look to be mostly superfast A1/A2 style machines and I also hope that the new clothing stores have less freakin silly looking clothes.

Hoodie and blazer? I blame the Rappers

Or hey just ditch underclothes altogether

Epic shoes, I just noticed she's wearing legwarmers with high heels

To be perfectly honest I would not recommend this game to a hardcore driving simulator enthusiast, nor would I recommend it to an arcade style racing enthusiast, Test Drive Unlimited 2 is for those people in between who like the other things you do (or could do) in car games without all the motorsport and car technicality or mindless pedal-to-the-metal-slamming-into-the-wall-in-order-to-turn gameplay. TDU2 is for the people who want a pleasantly realistic racer who are into cars but not toointo cars if you know what I mean, it’s a good game if you’re able to look past the flaws, The graphics do look a bit dated for this day and age and I’m not even going to mention the character models, I’m still not a fan of the way multiplayer is set up, but as I said before this is the first time I have tried a so called “Driving MMO” but I maintain the fact of the direct port from console does not help. The driving experience seems to vary, sometimes the driving feels like a chore, especially with the knockout races, other times I’m so entranced I’m paying more attention to the scenery than I am driving other times I’m having so much fun driving I’m switching camera angles like crazy as if I‘m making a movie while I’m driving.

The new island of Ibiza, the blue lines are the highways that i've traversed, zoom in further and you can see more roads

I enjoy Test Drive Unlimited 2, it lets me race classic and new cars in a great environment. If you want a semi-realistic driving game set in two and want to be a millionaire celebrity racing superstar and also be able to meet and race with other players, then this is the game for you.