Facing stiff competition it’s easy to say that Test Drive Unlimited doesn’t provide the best racing experience, yet it does offer something incredibly different. It doesn’t try to just “blur” the line between the single player and multi-player modes; it completely takes the line out of the picture, creating a seamless experience that can be enjoyed by all with an Xbox Live Gold membership.
As previously mentioned you will need Xbox Live to enjoy the best part of the game, its multi-player. The single player is enjoyable but not anything to tell your friends about. At the beginning you pick a character from a pre-created roster, and then you go about buying a house and your first car. Houses are important because they incorporate a certain amount of garage space. You’ll have to raise enough money to keep buying houses so that you can store all 90 cars that are available for purchase. Earning money consist of you driving around the beautifully modeled island of Oahu seeking races or escorting jobs such as helping a woman by transporting her and her groceries to where she lives. This system of starting and stopping at pre-destined points is very reminiscent of Crazy Taxi. Of course you can always go to a few racing spots that are located on your GPS and earn money that way.
One of TDU’s weaknesses is that there isn’t a spec of story that is tied to the game. This constantly makes you wonder why you’re racing in the first place. Of course it’s rare that any racing game would have a story, but those usually have a rewards system which TDU also lacks. In fact the game doesn’t reward you for good driving at all, yet it punishes you for the exact opposite. Depending on the frequency and magnitude of crashes the police might give chase and if caught they will give you a citation. This completely contradicts everything else that is involved with crashing in the game. For instance when you crash your car is not damaged, not scratched, nothing, and you can then hit the back button which puts your car back on the right track. So why go through all of the trouble to implement mechanics that help to skip the crashing process and then add the police chase which slows the game down when you crash?
However, all that aside, if you happen to have a Gold Membership you’re in for a fun experience! As soon as you finish the single player tutorial you are immediately assigned a server. This process is seamless and almost unnoticeable. Here you can cruise around the island of Oahu looking for competitors all the while completing the single player goals as well, which gives the game an MMOG (massive multiplayer online game) feel to it. Once you challenge someone by flashing your headlights they can either accept or deny your request. If accepted an ending point is decided along with any cash rewards that are given out. Sadly there isn’t a simple menu system where you can see all of the races available and can therefore enter at will. Instead you’ll have to drive to the race hub locations on your GPS if you want to race human competitors. If you choose to join a club (clan) you can race members of your club or you can race other clubs for racing superiority. You can also customize the game types, which offers a huge variety of online competition. Incredibly there are no loading times when cruising the city. In fact I have yet to see any late loading objects due to the games incredible draw distance.
