Welcome to the world's first obscene wealth simulator. Sure, one in every two driving games on the market involves collecting cash, but nothing else sees you lavish a sickeningly huge amount of money on yourself like this driving semi-MMO.
It's a tale of amassing massive riches during a privileged, unemployed life on the beautiful Hawaiian island of O'ahu, then spending all your said riches on cars. Endless numbers of super-expensive cars.
By way of example, here's an average day in my character's life. First thing in the morning, I wander down to the cavernous garage and idly choose which one of the eight incredibly expensive cars there I would like to take out today. A Ford GT chosen, I head off to the middle of nowhere, where a mysterious benefactor inexplicably pays me $20,000 to perform three laps of a circuit encompassing busy public roads.
During these laps, I hit a Hawaiian resident driving a utility vehicle of some sort.
Presumably, this unfortunate working Joe desperately needs that truck to make a living. It doesn't matter any more - it's been totalled by some millionaire foreigner, who heads off into the distance at 160mph with nary a backward glance. Even if he's still alive, the poor bloke's life is as good as over. There's not even a scratch on my car.
A couple more collisions later, the police finally catch up with me. A hot lady cop frowns at me from behind a pair of aviator shades. Three very-probably fatal hit-and-runs, plus high-speed evasion in a 35mph zone - this isn't going to go well. But... $2,000. That's what it takes to clear my name. I can earn that back in a second. It's pocket change. God bless the 50th state.
To celebrate avoiding a jail sentence yet again, I decide to buy something. But what? I know - a car! There's a problem. I'm out of space in my garage. So, I just buy another house (my fourth, in fact). I don't need the house itself, just the garage to keep more cars in. Cars, cars, lovely cars. Briefly, I visit the new house. I sit in the lounge, on my own, idly twirling an empty glass of water while I think about cars, watching a giant television set, which forever loops images of cars. The only signs that someone actually lives in this house are some magazines on the coffee table, which are all about cars. I pick up the phone and make a five-second call. I can't remember what I said or to whom, but I'm pretty sure it was about cars. Friendship, food, love - none of these things matter here. There are only cars.
Being a game is an entirely secondary motivation to Test Drive Unlimited's existence - its true raison d'ętre is collecting, driving, showing off and staring longingly at cars. It's a very specific kind of porn, and it's also quite brilliant. While something such as Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport on the consoles appeals to the same auto-fetishistic mindset, all they really allow a player to do with their archive of beautiful vehicles is race them again and again.
Test Drive Unlimited presents a dramatically broader experience: it's about enjoying your cars as treasured personal property. So, you get a huge island to roam around at will, peppered with car showrooms and garages to feed your addiction, with long, quiet roads to take your purchases to the very limit on. But that alone wouldn't sufficiently evoke the luxury car experience - so TDU joins, if you want it to, a persistent online world. That way, there are other people around to brag to, argue about preferred makes with, challenge to impromptu drag races and to form ultra-exclusive car clubs with. Racing, the mechanic that progresses the game and grants you untold riches, is very much only the means. The end is the cars themselves.
The racing, both online and offline, is nevertheless an essential element. And although it's decent enough, it hasn't received quite as much attention as the openness of the giant island. TDU is about one-third sim, two-thirds arcade racer, which makes for a cartoonier feel than the lush tropical graphics suggest. It certainly has its kicks, but it relies on you being more into the cars' aesthetics than having meticulous mechanical knowledge.
Still, there's room for some careful consideration come race time. Success, especially in online bouts, isn't always born of having the best car, but rather the right car for the job. Your rival's Camaro might have more horsepower than your car, but if bitter experience has taught you that it doesn't take sharp corners well, then you know that your lesser-powered steed will still have the edge in a bendy race.
Each car has a barrage of stats to pore over, but you really won't understand what your car is and isn't suited to until you've burned up a few miles of coastal highway in it. With an insanely large roster of cars (and a few motorbikes to boot) to buy from, not all of which are always in stock in the many showrooms, there's always some fresh curveball to shake your complacent faith in your own abilities, and always some lovely new shiny-shiny to lust uncontrollably after.
Rarely do you get an open road to hare around, but rather you get the streets that are lined with slow-moving AI traffic - it's the weaving, braking and stickshifting of town driving, but at five times the speed. The traffic's not stupid either - NPCs will try to get off the road if you're headed straight for them, they'll stop at lights and indicate, and even have accidents sometimes. They also do some ridiculous things on occasion - like turning right into you - but they certainly succeed in creating the seed of a living world for the online stuff to nurture further.
Still, there's a price to be paid for trying to appeal equally to both GTR and Need For Speed followers. If this were only a racing game, it would be an average one - the overdone stiffness of some cars and the lack of scope for pulling off artful moves makes it a slightly hollow experience at times. Again though, TDU isn't just about the racing - it's about car ownership. How each vehicle feels, rather than performs, is the priority.
Though far from realistic, each vehicle handles, reacts and even sounds palpably different to the last. Take a Jag E-type out on the road and you'll know it's a classic car just by the steely roar of the engine.
There's a reasonably irritating fly in the antifreeze, in that the licensed cars are - at the stern behest of their manufacturers - entirely indestructible. You can absolutely trash the poor NPC saps on the road (their vehicles are familiar-looking fabrications), but every player is driving something from another universe. This isn't TDU's fault, and to have plumped for damageable replicas instead of the real thing would have halved its appeal, but it adds a slight note of surrealism, which takes the edge off all the attention to detail.
Partly, that's because the robustness of the cars, the openness of the world and the total lack of concern for human life gives TDU something of a GTA vibe.
Hitting a lamppost at 160mph and coming to an immediate halt with neither the car nor the post receiving so much as a scratch on their paintwork feels pretty weird. It's particularly aggravating when this happens mid-race. Laboriously reversing away from the unyeilding pole you've hit takes ages, usually losing you the contest, and simply doesn't feel in keeping with your car's ability to survive a ten foot drop unscathed. There's an inherent conflict at TDU's heart. It's both a game in which you can get away with ludicrous cartoon stunts and one in which you should be a faultless driver who would never, ever have hit that post in the first place. Once again, it stems from the difference between racing and driving.
The game's almost designed more for you to cruise around the streets, stopping at lights and sticking to the speed limit, just enjoying your car. The driving is in real time, so a 60 mile cruise (a mere fraction of O'ahu's tarmacked girth) sticking to the speed limit will take about an hour. It's Microsoft Flight Simulator for cars.
Though the huge playground means this works remarkably well as a singleplayer game, it's the online element that elevates TDU from interesting experiment to actual triumph. The races are so much more compelling when you're thrashing a real person who thought he was better than you, while losing means you don't get any money - it actually goes to your rival.
Even on the smallest scale, it makes a massive difference. If there's someone watching, you'll likely pull a dramatic handbrake turn to change direction rather than a careful three-pointer. Or, if you're taking a casual Sunday drive and someone suddenly burns by you, you're a stronger man than I if you can resist the urge to chase them down. Because spontaneous bouts of playful or angry dodgems with strangers are so common, the indestructibility of the cars becomes a boon at times. After all, player-killing in a game where losing could cost you $600,000 would be horrendous.
Hopefully, most players will adopt the in-game voice comms. It's fascinating to hear banter and smack talk between other players, or to just be able to wind your window down and shout "bogies!" at passing motorists. And also, when there are real folk about, the laughable emptiness of your character's life whenever he's not driving his cars doesn't seem to matter all that much. He might only think about cars, but you can idly chat about life, love and Battlestar Galactica with your friends in the Ferraris-only car club.
Though there are clothes and houses to buy, cars to modify and custom races to create, TDU is much more a place to be than a place to play. Fortunately, it also does a fine job of convincing you that you're a fabulously wealthy bastard with a whole island to use as your vehicular playground.
TDU's MMO elements are slight compared to quest-and-kill fare, but it's still the greatest advancement of the driving-a-pretend-car concept in years.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
