Test Drive Unlimited details

[meancode]

The bikes are just as bad, and the driving isn't Forza. But that shouldn't put you off to the game. It is a wonderful concept executed quite well.

I have something over 50 hrs. into the game, almost to the Champion rank. Only thing past that is Ace and I believe you need all 1000 achievement points for that one.

[Leo_A]

Anyone else been spending time with this in recent weeks? The server recently went down so there was a flurry of activity in recent weeks before that happened. Before the end came, I finally got around to investing some serious time in it to enjoy the online aspects before it was too late after this game has sat on my shelf largely unplayed for years.

Since the server closure, I've also done a significant amount of the single player races. About 95% of the roads have been explored, over half the single player events are finished, about 3,000 miles or so have been logged, all of the online components were done achievement wise and I think I gleened most of the fun out of it that there was to be found, and many of the achievements have been earned. I really enjoyed the seamless integration of offline/online, the car physics, the environments, and the racing. Was a good selection half a decade ago even though I'm sure I paid far more only for it to sit on my shelf until now than I would've ended up paying for it in 2012 when I finally really started to play it.

What I didn't enjoy was the lack of variety in missions, the lack of rain (The sky does look like a storm is going to roll in occasionally, but that's as far as it ever gets), the lack of a full 24 hour day/night cycle which means you'll never be racing at night (Although early dawn and late afternoon are there), people's lips in the cutscenes continue moving well after their voice dialogue has stopped, car models and character models look more PS2 quality than 360 quality, no cars parked along city and village streets anywhere, no pedestrians anywhere which makes you feel like you're in a 'Cars' movie where all the life forms are vehicles, birds still appear and fly upwards even when inside tunnels (And no wildlife anywhere else), motorcycles handle strangely, and most all of the man-made landmarks like the remains of the USS Arizona and the memorial created above her seem completely absent (Outside of the natural environment itself, there's nothing more iconic about Oahu than the Arizona memorial yet it's missing and apparantly is also missing in TDU2).

Once I wrap this up, I think I'm going to move on to Burnout Paradise and then TDU2 before they become victims of server closures as well. I have to think Burnout Paradise doesn't have long to live with it being older and EA published. And despite TDU2 being relatively new, it really didn't seem to be recieved well so I suspect it won't be as long lived as the original was (Apparantly it's not much of an improvement above the original and it had a rash of server issues at launch, both of which killed any chance of being really successful when the reviews came in with mediocre scores).