I've never thought TDU's handling deserved quite the evisceration it's received at the hands of press and community. It also still has the bugs (we tested the retail Xbox 360 version), unreliable network performance, inconsistent graphics and physics, unwieldy interface and scrappy, lightweight vehicle handling. So Test Drive Unlimited 2 still has the magic. It's heightened further by the knowledge that every other player online is living the same moment. But watching the sun blush the underside of an overcast sky and reflect in scattered puddles, after driving country roads all night through a crackling thunderstorm, is a thrilling kind of poetry those snapshots can't muster. GT5 or F1 2010 can easily boast graphical superiority. Beautiful dynamic weather effects and a globally synchronised day/night cycle strengthen the intoxicating illusion that you're living a second life as a sportscar-obsessed playboy. Solo motorists have plenty to lose themselves in too, with off-road racing in hulking SUVs replacing motorbikes and opening up hundreds of acres of untouched terrain. There are more ways to play multiplayer, including co-op challenges, co-driving and a Hot Pursuit-style chase mode. There are deepened community features around the car clubs (now better than some MMOs' guild options) and user-created challenges. There's tons more real estate, with clubber getaway Ibiza appending its Mediterranean hinterlands to the rugged Pacific rock of Oahu (the latter's unlocked a little way into the game). Eden has expanded the things that mean the most to it, inching its game closer to being a true persistent world and a peerless theatre of wish-fulfliment. With this sequel, very little has changed. Rough and ready as it was, that dream wasn't compromised for anything Test Drive Unlimited remains the ultimate love letter to the open road in games. On the vast Hawaiian island of Oahu, Eden dared to dream of an online racing paradise that was set in something very much like the real world (1500 square kilometres of it). They've done it with more polish and panache, better graphics, more nuanced and rewarding handling, more consistency and, most importantly perhaps, more players.īut they don't have its heart, and they don't have its breathtaking horizons. We've seen other attempts to expand the horizons of the online racing game in the interim: Forza Motorsport's bustling bazaar of customisation and hot-lap competition, Gran Turismo 5's halting attempt at a more genteel autophiles' club, and Criterion socially networking its way around the online/offline divide in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.Įach has delivered parts of Test Drive Unlimited's bold promise: a thriving, connected community of petrolheads an epic physical struggle between man, machine and road a free-roaming kingdom of speed. It's been four and a half years since Lyon's Eden Games unfurled its manifesto for "massively open online racing" with the sprawling, quixotic Test Drive Unlimited and like every year in the young industry of videogames, they've been long ones.
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