Test Drive Unlimited
September 12,2006 - If you’ve been playing games for a long time, the name Test Drive might be familiar to you. The series originally started out on the PC but eventually found its way onto the consoles. The last few installments of Test Drive games haven’t been all that good. Eden Games hopes to change that with their latest offering in the Test Drive franchise, subtitles Unlimited. Unlimited tries to blend single and multiplayer together into a free roaming world as seamlessly as possible. For the most part, they succeeded.

You begin the game by selecting a character model to start off with. After which you’re treated to an introductory cutscene showing your character getting on a plane and flying to Hawaii. The game gives the impression that it will have an overarching storyline to keep the events flowing. That doesn’t turn out to be the case. Once you arrive on the island of Oahu you’re guided through the steps of buying your first house and car, and then you’re pretty much left to do as you please. You won’t be caught wishing for things to do because the game always has something available. You can compete in single player races, challenges, time trials, or take on a variety of missions. The race and challenge events are more enjoyable to play, but they don’t pay nearly as much as the missions. Earning money will let you buy bigger and better cars, bikes and houses. The missions ask you to take some sort of cargo, a package of questionable origin, a car, or a person to a specific destination. It doesn’t really matter what the cargo is, the goal is always the same. For this reason the missions tend to get rather monotonous, but it’s worth muddling through them for the monetary payoff.

The way that the game presents these races to you is clever. Icons will appear on the in-game map. Clicking on the icon will take you to the event. If you happen to have driven along the road that the event icon resides on, then the game will whisk you directly to it. If you haven’t, the location will be punched into your in-car GPS system and you’ll be given directions on how to get there. Eden has managed to find a way to encourage you to drive around without being overbearing about it. This is something that a lot of games with a free-roaming world have had trouble with. Though the single player races are good enough to keep you entertained, the weak AI can get to be annoying. You’ll often see the AI repeat the same mistakes over and over again, and they generally don’t pose much of a challenge at all. If they have a faster car than you, then they might be a bit tricky, but it’s not impossible to beat them even then.

What Test Drive Unlimited does so well though is blending the single and multiplayer modes together into one package. Multiplayer races will appear on the map as icons, just like the single player races do. You enter them just like single player races, though you’ll now have the option to race in Player Match or Ranked Match. Up to eight players can compete online. Playing online against other people means that you never know what you’ll get. You may find seven other good players, or you might find one jerk that just runs into everyone. It’s the chance you take playing online, but for the most part, online races are a lot of fun. That’s only the tip of the iceberg though. While you’re driving around the island, you’ll often run into other players who are doing the same thing as you, driving around, going to their next race. You can challenge them to a race by flashing your lights at them, if they accept; you simply choose a finish line on the map and try to get there as fast as possible. It’s a neat feature that hasn’t really been done on a console game before. It’s not perfect though. The game has multiple servers running. So it’s possible for two players to be in the same area in the game and not see each other because they’re on different servers. This had to be done to keep the game’s streets from being overwhelmed with traffic. It’s a necessary concession, but it would have been nice to be able to invite someone to join you in your instance of the game world.

A racing game is no fun if the driving mechanics aren’t solid. Test Drive Unlimited does a great job in this area. All of the cars and bikes have very distinct handling traits which translate into how far you can push a car before you’ll lose it. It doesn’t matter what car or bike you take, if you drive like a maniac, you can completely lose control of it. Once you find that line, you’ll definitely get a feeling of satisfaction knowing when you’ve flirted with disaster and come out the better.

The island of Oahu is a pretty looking place. From the beachside highways to the windy mountain roads, the scenery all looks fantastic. It’s a serene and pleasant place to drive through There’s quite a lot of detail put into making this tropical island look as good as it can. HDTV owners will definitely see the benefits of the higher resolution displays, but even on an SDTV, the game still looks remarkably good. Though the island does look great, it’s odd that you don’t see any people at all. You’d expect to see pedestrians, cyclists, and people lounging on the beach. Sadly, the only signs of life are the traffic cars on the roads. The cars you’ll be driving all look fantastic. They have a number of neat details like working doors and windows. This is something that really hasn’t been done all that often in a racing game. Unfortunately there are a few blemishes here and there. The game has a few ugly looking textures here and there. There’s also some texture and world loading problems. These happen when you’re driving faster than the game can stream in the data needed. Sometimes you’ll notice textures pop in right in front of you. You might also end up on a section of world that hasn’t fully loaded in yet. If this does happen the game just resets your car back onto the road, so no harm is done. However it’s a bit ugly and makes a good case for caching the entire game world onto the Xbox 360 Hard Drive. Glitches aside, Test Drive Unlimited is a great looking game.

The game’s audio is mostly well done. The car and driving sounds are very well done. There are even some subtle details that make you think that some time was definitely spent in making sure that everything sounded right. For example, when you’re sitting in your garage or a showroom in the in-car view, the engine will sound different depending on whether the windows are up or down. The music on the other hand really isn’t anything that noteworthy. There are some a few popular bands on the soundtrack, but for the most part the music is composed of relatively unknown artists. That being said, it isn’t bad, but it probably won’t be compelling enough to keep you from pushing the Xbox Guide button and flipping to your favorite custom soundtrack.

On the whole, Test Drive Unlimited is a very good game. The way it blends single player and multiplayer together into one package is nice, and is something that hasn’t been done in a console racing game to date. The game plays very well; it looks pretty, and sounds alright. For anyone looking for a racing game that does things a bit differently, Test Drive Unlimited is worth checking out.

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