Test Drive Unlimited

Published on: 13th May, 2009

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• Test Drive: Unlimited

Test Drive Unlimited is quite unlike any other driving game. How on Earth could anyone think it possible – or sane – to try and replicate a tropical paradise etched with some 1000 miles of roads, featuring no load times when roaming, accurately-rendered cars from over two-dozen manufacturers (including detailed dashboard views) and a sickening number of race-based challenges? We don’t know. But Melbourne House, thankfully, hasn’t even stopped to get snagged on such a question – it’s just knuckled down, crammed everything in from the Xbox 360 version and squeezed out something of a technical marvel.

So, then, welcome to Oahu, a real Hawaiian island. It hasn’t been replicated down to every fine detail, but its 1600 square kilometers of land mass is intact. That’s bigger than Just Cause, fact fetishists, and it makes Vice City feel like Vice Backwater. And it’s all yours to cruise across, taking in its highways, byways, slip-road junctions, coastal stretches and mountain switchbacks. Its variety is more in the finer details than any grand shifts – Oahu is, after all, largely a giant tropical forest speckled with settlements and other urban bits, grooved with an enormous road system – and whose overall diversity doesn’t rival that of a typical rally game, even.

If you’re in this for a quick fix, then it can all look too much like looping countryside. If not, you’ll soon begin to feel that there’s simply no better place for Test Drive Unlimited to happen than a lush, wide-open driving arena where the sun never sets, a beautiful place where you’ll want to fall in love all over again with your favorite supercars.

And that’s just it – the magic of Test Drive Unlimited, despite its feats as a piece of software, isn’t instantly apparent. It’s in the overall experience it’s attempting to give you, and one you can only settle into after you’ve spent a few hours taking in that particular, laid-back, grown-up playboy lifestyle it offers. You drive in any direction just for the sheer joyous freedom of it, not because you’re hunting for secret tokens or a hidden crocodile farm that unlocks helicopters.

Work your way through the game’s opening stretch – an auto-GPS system will guide you between challenges you’ve not completed, if you want – and start to bulk out your garage, and one of two things will happen. Either you’ll drop the pad and start to crave something with more focus, or it suddenly all clicks into place, and you find yourself getting all excited about buying a new house (there are plenty) while smiling dumbly as you sit in a car showroom, checking out the interior of each vehicle and making its windows go up and down, excited at the prospect of expanding your collection of motors and eager to take a new purchase out for an extended spin (or simply a time-limited test drive or rental, if you’ve not built up the cash).

And if you become successfully hooked, then Oahu feels like a refreshing and roomy home, one where you can go from a lazy ocean drive to a foot-to-the-floor sprint along a motorway, stopping as and when you like to take part in any of the game’s multitude of race and time-trial challenges, which can be teleported to whenever you’ve visited their location once. But the lack of variety in those events may once again sting those who crave a greater selection of things to do.

While its vehicles are high-powered, they’re not high-maintenance in that you won’t need to pass any license tests or mess around with optimal weight distributions to get the best out of them. The handling, while offering a tangible difference from car to car, feels like a good blend of sim-like discipline and arcade accessibility, but you’d best turn the traction aids off just to give your ride room to properly shake its ass. And there’s a broad range of motors, from dawdling but sexy-revving retro classics, through to supercharged, drifting monsters.
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