4 Hours Review: Test Drive Unlimited

What I'm having the most difficulty with isn't the game, but the fact that
what I had initially labeled as crap on a disk, was thrown back in my face
as technically challenging and vast. That's okay. If there's one thing I
don't mind being wrong about, it's how bad a video game is. That would be
like saying I hate when someone tells me I scratched a loto ticket wrong
and actually won something.

But with TDU, it's self assumed acronym, arcade driving has finally left
the ranks of Cruisin' World and even surpassed a little bit of Need for
Speed (GASP!). With something like 70% of 360 owner's online at one time
or another (and no, I don't remember where I heard that), integrating
online with single player is absolutely glorious. Even the demo had Live
enabled, something I didn't realize my first time getting fed up with the
controls before even seeing another car. It's like playing Cruisin' at the
arcade and some joker with too much cologne on comes and grabs the wheel
next to you. But now there are 10 or so people on your island and you
don't have to bother with any of them if you don't want. Or you can smack
into them at 120mph if you care. That's the "glorious" part.

The system works pretty much the same as most driving games do though.
Complete some missions over and over again to make money to buy more cars.
The only difference is you can also do Crazy Taxi-like missions, which
only net you coupons for clothes, where your timed and deducted "life" for
crashing into things. Another type of mission I've only seen once I'd like
to do again was getting to take some rich guy's Ferrari to the shop. It
was untimed but I could only try it once. It took 20 minutes to drive
clear across town (not the whole island yet) and I ended up netting 68k
out of a possible 80k. That's huge money for having been the second thing
I did in the game.

And while having online on constantly is great, doing the challenges on
the map that are just pre-determined game types for online racing are
horribly structured. You have no idea who you are racing and what car they
are driving until you "ok" the race. Unless you create a custom race
properties (which doesn't include the route), your Ford Mustang could have
to face a couple V-12s at the starting line.

Another poor feature is the voice-GPS. The map is just big enough to see
your route, but the inconsistent voice-GPS sometimes forgets to tell you
about the upcoming intersection before telling you to turn, if she does at
all. I've lost quite a few timed challenges because of it's spacey
computer programming.

But for $40, one of the cheapest new 360 games out there, this is going to
hold me over just fine until November 14th, when Need For Speed Carbon
hits. It's going to be my replacement for the lame online-faking Tokyo
Xtreme Drift.