The New Flesh

Have you ever dreamed of driving really fast down every road on Oahu? No, me neither, but that’s what I’ve been doing virtually in my spare time these last few days in Test Drive Unlimited.

I got off on the wrong foot with this one in many ways, my first contact with it was when I found the demo pre-installed on my new 360’s hard disk. I loaded it up and had a go but found it rather poor. I couldn’t see the point of it, it just dropped me in a fancy car on an island that looked remarkably like Hawaii and so I immediately did what any self respecting six year old boy would do and deliberately crashed into the first six cars I saw, this got me almost immediately pulled over by the police who took some of my money. So at this point I could see it was a racing game with no damage modelling to the player car that punished me for crashing into things with rubbish unskipable cut scenes involving being given a $40,000 parking ticket by a pseudo-sexy female police officer. Soon after that I deleted the demo from my hard disk because I was sure I’d never want to play it again.

However last week I found myself picking up the Atari Collection of games that includes the entire Baldur’s Gate series and 9 other games for £10 and Test Drive:Unlimited was one of those games and somewhat strangely it was the one I found my hand gravitating towards when I decided I wanted a break from Team Fortress 2.

So I found myself staring at a queue of horribly shallow looking yuppies waiting at an airport and being told to pick my character.

Yuppies, couldn't you just punch them?

That’s one of many odd things about Test Drive: Unlimited, it seems to be trying to my a lifestyle simulator, you can actually progress a short distance in the game simply by buying cloths with tokens (for some reason clothing shops won’t accept money, only tokens) won by picking up ‘Top models’ or ‘Hitchhikers’ in your sports car and taking them where they want to go. The difference between a ‘Top Model’ and a ‘Hitchhiker’ is of course that all ‘Hitchhikers’ are male where as all ‘Top Models’ are female and as such are more prone to making suggestive comments.

Another lifestyle element is that you have to buy increasing numbers of houses if you want extra cars because apparently garage extensions are impossible in Hawaii. Buying new cars is also made more tricky by the fact you also have to visit different car show rooms around the island to look at different cars. You can fast travel to the different showrooms once you’ve unlocked them by driving past them so the only actual effect of this is that you’ll get really sick of skipping entering a showroom cut-scenes, it’s really just pure hassle pretending to be realism.

Another odd thing about the game is it’s graphics, it’s not ugly, the cars are actually quite pretty and everything else is passable for it’s 2007 vintage but there’s something about the light, the trees and contrast in detail between your own indestructible car, the just slightly too short draw distance and everything else in game that just makes you feel like your driving through the uncanny valley.

Driving down uncanny valley

The AI on the other hand is well outside the uncanny valley, it’s just truely exceptionally bad. The police will simply drive directly towards you, that might not sound a bad model but it means that if they’re heading towards you they just speed past in the opposite direction and if they’re ahead of you they do a U-turn as you approach to overtake you thus almost never have any trouble losing a tail and so the difficult is ramped up by making it very hard to lose any wanted level once you’ve got it.

There’s also a strange criminal undercurrent to the game, as if they were thinking of making a game that was a lot more edgy but backed away from it at the last minute so ended up leaving some of the dodgy activities but took away the explanation, for instance there are package delivery missions where your told to avoid the cops and the vehicle transport missions which start with a brief cut-scene where the NPC says “Your taking it to get it repaired? Hmm, okay. Just bring it back in good condition.” but the subtitles read “Hey you, can you deliver this vehicle for me? It could mean a lot of dough for you!” Unfortunately the game is filled with rough edges like that. Little things that look like they could have been fixed relatively easily but weren’t. Like the frequent sparks from the random traffic when they bottom out on the road. The control setup system is another example of rough design. The default controls are for the keyboard reasonably enough but if you want to use a joypad then you’ve got to redefine every single command manually and when you do it overwrites the keyboard controls. So say you’ve got a 360 pad and you bind the pause menu to the start button but then forget to turn on you 360 pad before starting the game and exiting the garage, well it won’t detect it and start working when you turn it on and so you won’t be able to quit the game, you have to alt-tab to Windows and end the game process manually to exit.

And yet I’ve found myself by choice playing it for a shamefully large number of hours over the passed week. For all it’s rough edges it has that x factor that keeps you grinding away to get enough money for a McLaren F1. The driving itself feels okay, nothing special, well except for the motorcycles, they’re a bit special in that they’re almost completely rubbish. The racing itself is pretty weak because it suffers from more dodgy AI, the rubberband effect being used to keep things competitive is very obvious and takes a lot of the fun out of it so the time trails, speed races and delivery missions are all much more satisfying. I’m really not sure quite why I like this game, perhaps it’s the road layout, the road layout is rather special simply because it’s unlike anything seen in any other computer game that I can think of because it’s simply a simplified version of the real Oahu road system and so it does feel more authentic than the road systems of sandbox games that have a racing element. There’s also nothing quite like it, pure open world racers are strangely rare beasts, they should be common as muck because it’s such a natural fit but in fact FUEL is the only one that springs to mind.

The races are also pleasingly varied, far more varied then they look at first glance because the basic race and time trail modes mix things up by turning off the traffic for some races and using a basic damage meter to keep you from just pin-balling your way around the course on others. The damage meter is actually worth a special mention because it’s so hilariously bad! The reason it’s funny is the exact same system is used for ‘damage’, ‘passenger fear’ or abstract ‘good driving’ depending on the context. This means that driving at 180mph on the wrong side of a the road doesn’t scare passengers one little bit but parking on grass will depending on context either cause $2000 dollars worth of damage per second or cause your passenger to scream in terror like they’ve watched ‘Tremors’ one to many times and developed an irrational fear of soil.

I still don’t know what to think of Test Drive: Unlimited. It walks an odd line between realistic and arcade racing. The cars are licensed and insanely well recreated and the world is obviously trying to look real but and it’s not at all realistic in it’s damage modelling or and then there’s the odd and very annoying criminal justice system, it’s not fun so it must be included for realism but it’s not realistic so… I guess it’s just a simple car collection game at heart but it doesn’t do that well because it doesn’t let you customise them beyond changing the paint colour and buying very basic tuning packs so there’s nothing for the true obsessives to play with so compared to it’s contemporary Forza Motorsport 2 is looks very weak as a car collection game. I guess the bottom line is it’s an open world racing game and until recently it was the only open world racing game and so that’s what it does and does moderately well. I can’t say it’s a good game but it is different and that counts for something. Certainly for a simple game I didn’t think I’d enjoy it’s given my a startling amount of pleasure and food for thought this week. I’d be happy to have paid £4 for it so I’m nearly half way to the cost of that Atari Collection already and if you see that collection in PC World or elsewhere for £10 then I’d recommend picking it up. If you can’t then I’d recommend getting the 360 version if you’ve got a choice because that will get round the control setup issues and the PC version comes with a free SecuROM infection. However looking at the prices of new copies I recommend you give it a miss entirely unless you’ve a serious interest in racing games because when push comes to shove this is a dated and mediocre game that is only really worth playing for it’s gimmicks.

6/10