Customer Reviews

Test Drive Unlimited DVD-Rom

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Test Drive Unlimited pros:
* comes on DVD instead of multiple CDs
* wide open environment (the entire 'big island' of Oahu, Hawaii)
* clever and seamless mixing of SP and MP experiences when online
* a truly huge selection of cars, from foreign to domestic, and muscle cars to exotics
* impressive vistas and white-knuckle racing challenges, with strangers and (with a little work) with friends
* driving wheels really make a difference, although you can race with a joystick, pc game pad controller, or just your keyboard (you will have the most fun and the best driving experience with a wheel, however - serious drivers won't think twice about this)
* NPC cars seem to ask, for the most part, like common people driving around and doing what they do, including signalling to turn and slowing down for intersections, obeying the traffic lights, and so on
* hit too many cars and the police will chase you - you can outrun them, or you can crash and burn and find yourself paying a fine or even spending a little downtime in the slammer to think about the error of your ways
* buy houses in scenic places with 4, 6, 8, or 10-car garages
* keep a stable of cars in multiple houses around the island
* tunnels!
* multiple car classes, from E - A (with G having some surprises of its own)
* ability to take screenshots in mid-race, changing camera angles, zooming in and out, and so forth. catching air and taking a screenshot is too cool
* motorcyles!

Test Drive Unlimited cons:
* weird save bug that may corrupt your profile and cost you your latest progress - suggest saving your savedgames off to another location after each successful session
* some NVIDIA-related drivers issues (check the Atari TDU forums for which drivers seem to work and what to do when they don't)
* police NPCs are drones. If you blow the doors off a police car, they don't chase you down. Apparently, it's ok to speed as long as 'race clean'

Overall, this game has high replay value, no monthly charges, a helpful community, and some of the best PC racing action I've ever experienced in eleven years of gaming (coming second only to the vehicular carnage game Carmageddon, lo, these many years ago). You may need to hit the forums to figure out how to do this or that, but when the game is working as it should, it is fast, gorgeous, and a metric ton of fun.

I've played several versions of Test Drive since its ages-ago origin in the late 1980s on Commodore computers. This latest incarnation sticks to those arcade-racing roots. That means this is a fun, easy to play, non-realistic racing game. It is NOT, and was not meant to be a racing simulator. For that, try the GTR FIA GT Racing Game racing games. But for fun classic arcade-style racing, this latest Test Drive is a great choice.

This edition is dressed up with the ability to own multiple houses, cars, outfits, etc. The cut scenes and other non-driving sequences feel like they should be more interactive than they are, and the voiceovers and character animations are a little simplistic. But you buy this kind of game for the driving, not for the fluff. And the driving is great! The cars are beautifully rendered, the engines and road sounds feel authentic, the scenery is pretty and flows by smoothly. Well done, and most importantly, fun to play.

I will disagree with the other reviewers who state this needs a top-end system to play. I played this with a current (mid 2007) entry level PC (lowest-end dual core Intel) but with a moderate video card (Nvidia 8600GT, this model: XFX GeForce 8600GT XXX Edition 620Mhz 256MB PCI Express x16 SLI Ready Video Card (Dual DVI)). With this combo, the game plays very smoothly at 1280x960, with the detail level and anti-aliasing turned all the way up. I first tried it with a low-end graphics card, the default card that shipped with my Dell (Nvidia 7300LE), and the game was unplayable on there. The moral of this story is you need a reasonably nice graphics card, not an expensive gaming system, so system requirements should not much limit this game's audience.

Recommended! Enjoy your driving!

TDU has terrific single-player "solo" missions that range from novice easy as you learn the game and driving techniques, to difficult (there's 4 I've not been able to complete so far - but I will!). And TDU's multi-player on-line racing is also really fun and addictive - great races (again easy-to-difficult), and friendly community of players from across the world.

Game graphics are stunning, car sounds are wonderful, and driving physics are nicely tailored to each vehicle. Yes its "arcade" with pre-defined car upgrade levels, rather than highly customizable "simulation" car adjustments, but that's fine with me and adds to the fun. I'm running Core2Duo E6600 (2.4GHz) with nVidia-based 7950GT video card, and TDU runs very smooth.

Highly recommended, good for hundreds of hours of driving fun!

As a frequent visitor to Oahu, I am very familiar with the roads in and around Honolulu and Oahu. TDU simulates the flavor of driving around the island, albeit not the details. Even if you know your way around the island very well, you'll still get lost because most of the landmarks and road markers are not in the simulation. It would be nice they would tell you which on-ramp or off-ramp takes you to H-2, for example. After a while, you learn to use the GPS to guide you from point A to point B.

If you drive out Farrington Highway down to Kaena Point, the road does not terminate abruptly as in real life, but they've completed the road so it goes completely around to the west coast of Oahu. The off-roaders and hikers will be disappointed. Also, they've fenced off Dillingham Airfield, so you can't drive into the parking area like in real life.

The controllability of the cars varies according to the type of car, but you'll get use to controlling a car after one trip around the island. Most people would say the controllability is pretty bad in general, considering these are world class sports cars we are supposed to be driving.

All in all, a nice diversion if you are familiar with and in love with Oahu. It's no substitute for actually going there, however.

A lot of roads to cover in this massive undertaking. I found the settings for the steering an additional challenge. Steering is OK if you're staying within a speed limit but when racing, the car can get very loose. I've not advanced too far, due to lack of time, so the steering may improve with better cars and tuning.

this game is amazing I think this is the best driving simulator of all, and when you use the Logitech G25 Steering Wheel the game become even better. the only thing is that you really need a a faster computer than what it says on the box. I would recommend you use at least 2gigs of memory,the new Pentium Quad core processor because when you are playing the game their are so many things going on. I recommend a 512Mb gddr3 video card and at least 10gigs of hard drive space dedicated just to the game. but once you have this it an amazing video game.

My dilemmas were these:
A - I don't want to buy a PS3 to play a few games (Gran Turismo 5 (GT5) in this case), when I have a computer that can handle the graphics.
B - Need for Speed (NFS) is cool, but NFS's wings and paint jobs are ridiculous for the purists.

This game, in my opinion, trumps GT5 and NFS. My reasoning is this:

1. Test Drive Unlimited (TDU) focused on the authenticity of driving these spectacular cars. The look, the feel, and the sound of the cars in TDU are excellent virtual representations of the real thing. The up side is you don't have to futz around with a Citroen C2 just to get a car you really want. In about 5 challenges in an Alfa Romeo I bought an Aston Martin DB9! All the cars are upgradeable, but are very simple upgrades. GT5 and NFS:Shift offer full vehicle tuning, but that's not what I want. I want to drive a Lamborghini one minute and a Shelby GT 500 the next.

2. Two Words - Open World. This is a Grand Theft Auto (GTA) size map with better GPS. Once you have unlocked a road you can "Warp" to it saving you the 45 minutes you use in GTA driving to your next challenge. Speaking of 45 minutes. This map is to scale. When you have to drive 5 miles it would take you 5 minutes if you were going 60 MPH. There is a race that is one lap around the Island it will take the better part of an hour to complete.

3. Challenging... Well...Challenges. Excuse the redundancy, but they don't make these challenges easy enough your grandmother could do them. If you want all perfects... be ready for some sofa time. You have to concentrate for every one, from learning to drive to lapping the entire island. There are races, time trials, driving skills, transports, hitchhikers, and a few more. I would compare some of them to Crazy Taxi from the Dreamcast way back when, get from A to B and don't be late.

If this game were perfect there would be no need to write a review so the down sides:

1. A couple major car manufacturers are missing. BMW and Prorche to name the most obvious. If your not afraid to mod your game you can find those cars with no problems. If you aren't so keen on modding, learning to love a Ferrari is not a hard thing to do.

2. This does not have the Top Gear Test Track.


I recommend this to everyone who loves cars. I hope my opinion was helpful and I can't wait for the sequel (if it happens)!

When the servers were up it was a epic game..many years of fun..lots of friends..but now the game is gone..no on-line connection...all you can do is just enjoy the spectacular physics of the game.

Test Drive Unlimited

I am running this on a Phenom II X3 720 (2.8 GHz, 3-core) with a Sapphire HD 4870 512MB GPU, and a Logitech Driving Force GT wheel/pedal set. I run it at 1280x1024 in full details, and the game flies. The physics engine is pure arcade although it isn't as bad as the Need for Speed series. The game really shines in the sand-box style gameplay where you can just choose to explore Oahu with a variety of cars that are graded from A to F in terms of performance/handling. Grade A cars range from the Maserati MC12 to the Enzo Ferrari or the Pagani Zonda, while Grade D through F cars are generally your run of the mill production cars like the Mustang GT, Audi TT, etc...

There are side missions like escorting a runway model or hitchhikers to their destination. The reward are bonus coupons used to buy accessories for your character (shoes, sunglasses, etc...) while the time/speed/race missions involve monetary rewards. You can also trade cars online or race other playerse online. What's unique about TDU is that the multiplayer and singleplayer games are seamless. You don't necessarily log onto a separate multiplayer game, but instead you are immersed in an environment where you can do both: cruise with online players or engage in singleplayer missions.

Pros: Great looking graphics, fully detailed car interiors, excellent engine sounds, and fun to drive with a wheel/pedal set.

Cons: Repetitive objectives, basic money/point grind like any other RPG or MMORPG game, the traffic and cops are annoying. The game is also very unstable. I've run into frequent hangups and lockups with version 1.66, and it seems everyone has abandoned the game. My PC runs fine with much more intensive games, so it is not a hardware issue.

Overall: 4/5

I bought TDU with a couple of other games like GTR2 and Cabela's 4x4 off-road, and being a real world off-road enthusiast who owns 2 Range Rovers, I immediately started with Cabela's off road, and got bored easily. My next love is F1 (a Senna, then Schummy fan), so I thought GTR2 will excite me, but it didn't satisfy me. So I loaded up TDU.

I've never gone back to the other games. I play TDU all the time. Started getting frustrated playing it on my older Dell Inspirion, but I got a new Dell Precision M6300 64bit WinXP top end workstation, and ever since then, I've just been driving flawlessly around the Island.

I love the scenery, the road variety; from windy narrow roads, to uphill/downhill, to the highways, and straight out high speedways. The tunnels are a thrill! The assortment of cars are so enticing, and the ability to plan out your progress financially and otherwise is addictive.

The drives are exhilarating, the car renders fantastic, the engine sounds and all are satisfying.

The challenges have quite and assortment; from SP to MP and from races, time challenges, to hitchhikers. It covers them all. You can even shop around. You even get to buy houses with wonderful views, and own an assortment of cars (though disappointingly I don't get a Range Rover Sport in it). Achieve all that you may not be able to achieve in your real life :)

I love this game and wonder if I'll be able to find another to thrill me as much as this TDU because I'm so busy playing it that I may not be be able to try another.