Be prepared to be blown away
Atari’s Test Drive Unlimited has been the subject of mucho speculation by those of us who’ve been looking at the screens and trailers released to promote the game. The biggest question has always been whether those screens we’ve been drooling over are in-game or pre-rendered. Well, now I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that those screenshots are from in-game gameplay… how do I know? Simple… I’ve played it.
Yes, that’s right. I’ve sat down and taken Test Drive Unlimited for a test drive, and, if this very early playable code is anything to go by, Atari have an awesome game on their hands and PGR3 had better keep an eye on the mirror as Test Drive Unlimited is going to blow it away.
Now, I need to make it crystal clear that I’ve been playing the latest build of the game which, as cool as it is, is still some way from being completed for the June release date. This means that a lot of stuff is still being worked on, but I can tell you that what’s in there so far isn’t just a step forward for racing games… it’s a quantum leap.
Realism and immense detail
We’ve got so much in here that I’m almost at a loss for where to start. I guess the best place would be the apartment your in-game character owns, as this is where the game picks up when you first load it. You need to know that the entire of Test Drive Unlimited is set on the Hawaiian island of Oahu which has been recreated using topographical maps and satellite imagery to give as realistic and faithful reproduction of the island as possible.
In case you’re wondering why we’re on Oahu (pronounced wa-hoo), it’s because the island offers up various road types from the straight, open freeways (ideal for outright speed blasts) to city and urban roads where slow moving traffic is the main obstacle, down to tight, winding country roads to give your technical driving skills a challenge. And no, it’s nothing to do with being able to take a Ferrari 308 GTSi and ‘do a Magnum’ off the grass verge… though you can, if you want…
But another reason for choosing Oahu as the location is that the island itself fits in perfectly with the other side of Test Drive Unlimited’s game, which allows you to express your mercenary ‘bling’ side. You see, rather than just give you some dosh, let you do some racing, unlock a new car and all that stuff we’ve seen before, Test Drive Unlimited plays a more realistic ‘lifestyle’ type game.
If you’re an uber-racer, you’re going to win cars and cash on a regular basis. In real life you’re not going to blow all that disposable income on cars, you’ll be wanting to get your apartment kitted out with all the latest gear… you’ll want to dress well buying designer clothes… in essence, you’ll want to lead a life worthy of a guy or girl earning a lot of dosh, and in Test Drive Unlimited you can do just that.
As you progress through the game (which I’ll cover in detail in a minute), you earn more cash and respect and unlock new areas of the island. This gives you access to new apartments to buy, new dealerships, new clubs and new shops. The apartments obviously cost more in the ‘elite’ areas of the island, but you can then run a stable of more cars in the garage too. The dealerships give you access to nicer, faster and more exclusive cars and the shops will let you buy some top quality gear to kit your character out in.
Atari have been working hard to make everything in Test Drive Unlimited as true to life as possible, so you’ll find that everything in the Ben Sherman shop is actually available in real life too. I’ve got a couple of Ben Sherman shirt’s which I saw in there as well as a top I fancied getting… so we kitted my guy out in that. Speaking of your character, as is the norm for games these days, you can totally customised facial features to create an in-game version of yourself if you want to, so now you can have a look and see if the Pagani Zonda really does suit you…
The cars... oh the cars!
And speaking of the Zonda, that bring us nicely to the main crux of the game, the cars. And here is where Test Drive Unlimited takes the phrase ‘attention to detail’, screws it up into a little ball, flicks it out of the electric window and starts all over again. We’ve seen racers with detail on the outside of the car. We’ve seen racers with detail from the drivers view in the car… but what we haven’t seen is an attention to detail both inside and out that, simply put, is stupefying.
Not only do the cars in Test Drive Unlimited look like their real life counterparts on the outside, they look the same on the inside too. But it’s not some showroom brochure approximation, this is a fully realised 3D model of the inside of the Lotus Exige or the Lamborghini Gallardo… or the Mercedes SLR or the Mclaren F1 or, in fact, just about any dream car you could think to mention, including classics such as the Audi Quattro or the Ford Mustang Shelby GT and even the less prestigious and more affordable motors like the Audi TT… all your dream cars are in here and they’re in here at a level of detail that you’ll find it hard to get past.
When you’re in the dealership looking at buying your next tarmac cruising monster, you’ll have the option of buying your chosen car in the official, real world colour schemes that the cars some in. So if your rather unfashionable like me, you can get your Lotus Exige in British Racing Green (I’m told Chrome Orange is the most popular colour for them) or you can choose the interior trim for your Merc from the selection Mercedes actually offer.
The same goes for after-market add-on parts, if you fancy pimping your ride. This is all official licensed gear that you can soup up your chosen car with. Be it some low profile rims or engine enhancements, it’s all in here and available… if you have the cash and the social standing to buy it… and you get both of those by racing… So now you’ve got a decent car and a decent place to crash… time to hit the streets and go cruising for some action.
An idyllic Hawaiian paradise
When you hit the streets of Oahu is when you fully start to realise just how incredible Test Drive Unlimited looks. In fact, I’m almost at loss to try and get across just how gorgeous the environment is… all I can say is that the screenshots, as amazing as they are, just REALLY don’t do the game justice. Graphically, Test Drive Unlimited could well be the most visually jaw-dropping bit of software on the Xbox 360 we’ve yet seen. It really is that good. Sure, with this being early playable code, there was the odd glitch here and there, but we’ve still got a few months of development time to be spent on the game, so the odd texture flicker here and there will be ironed out but even in its current state Test Drive Unlimited is gob smackingly good to look at.
With the satellite mapping that Atari have employed, you get a model of Oahu that’s a faithful to the real island as possible, though a few roads have been changed a little to give a better driving experience. But beyond that, the key buildings, houses and general roadside paraphernalia are all as they would be in the real world… even the dealerships in the game are at the same locations as the real dealerships selling those cars that have been so brilliantly recreated. So if you ever go to Hawaii, make sure you check out Oahu and see if you can find your way around from your Test Drive Unlimited experience… Atari reckon they’ve got it cracked.
So once you’ve gotten over the incredible detail in the roads, the towns and villages, the city areas and the lush roadside vegetation, how about taking another look at the cars? This is another area where Test Drive Unlimited jumps up and smacks you in the mouth because as nice as it was to see all that wonderful detail in the car showroom, where you’d expect to be able to see it, its even more stunning when you get out on the road and see that the full 3D interior you were enjoying at the dealership is still there when you’re out driving! Using the right joystick you control where your character is looking, meaning you can pan around inside the car and admire your Recaro seats, or muck around with the fully functional ICE.
But the detail doesn’t stop there. You can raise and lower the windows, drop the top (if you’ve gone for a drop-top model), play about with the lights and even work the wipers to clear the windscreen off from the bugs that splatter there… and yes, bugs DO splatter onto the screen. The wipers do more than the cosmetic function of adding in detail, you’ll need them for when it’s raining too, just as you’ll need the headlights for night driving as Atari have coded in weather and daytime/night time effects too. And of course they look as good as the rest of the game.
So now we’ve gotten over how cool it all looks, let’s get some bangin’ choons going, (maybe by streaming them from my iPod through the Xbox 360 and into the game, or perhaps just from the Xbox 360’s HDD, or we could settle for some of the in-game tunes), wind down the window, drop an arm out and go cruising for a race…
It's a Massively Multiplayer game too!
Now the number of these supercars and superbikes I’ve actually driven in real life is roughly, er… none, so I can’t give you an accurate estimation of how real they feel, but I can tell you that as they’re all licensed from the makers, the in-game handling is as true to life as the actual manufacturers say it should be. Now don’t forget that this is an arcade/sim racer, so although we’re screaming along at 180mph in a Shelby, there’s no way on you’ll be able to make a tight right hander without backing off and taking a racing line. Test Drive Unlimited, even though it has still to have many gameplay tweaks, drives a damn fine game.
Test Drive Unlimited nicely strikes the balance between arcade fun and sim-style realism. So if you floor it in some 550hp rear-wheel drive monster, you are going to have to work to keep it on the straight without the back wheels trying to overtake the fronts. Similarly, many of the cars corner like they’re on rails, unless you do something daft like boot it halfway through, in which case you’ll get some great power induced oversteer and lift-off understeer. Some of the tight, twisty roads on Oahu make for some of the most exciting driving you can have, even without actually racing anyone.
Have you ever wondered why no-one has made a game where you can just drive around a realistic location in as real a car as possible? If so, then here’s the answer to that dream. I could’ve spent most of the session just hopping between cars and bikes, cruising around and seeing how well I could drive a particularly tricky mountain road… but racing is a key part of the game, so I had a few of those too.
At this point I should mention that Test Drive Unlimited has a solid single player mode that sets you with various challenges that you activate by driving into the icons dotted around the roads. Completing these might earn you cash or respect and help to bump you up the general rankings. The real fun comes in when you find another like-minded driver who’s up for a race as this is where serious money and even cars can be won. In the single player game, the bots give a pretty decent challenge but the AI is still being worked on so it’d be unfair to comment on how they play right now. But to be honest, unless you’re unlucky enough to not have a broadband connection, you’ll probably spend far more time online as superbly Oahu in Test Drive Unlimited is a persistent MMO where you’ll meet and race against real players.
Yep, that’s right, the entire island of Oahu will exist as an online world for you to live in, cruise around in your latest motor, checking out what other players are driving and then challenging them to races. You can even go to online clubs on the island and just chill out, perhaps smack talking with other drivers before taking the argument out on the road. Unlike PGR3, there’s no lobby system here. This is a persistent online world for you to drive around in at your leisure. Of course, until you’ve been playing for a while you’ll still find some of the island closed off, but that’ll only spur you on to get more dosh, respect and notoriety to get access to those ‘elite’ areas.
I had a race... and got pwned
But the online racing is where Test Drive Unlimited really comes into its own, as the system Atari have designed is so brilliant and yet so simple you have to wonder why no-one has thought of it before. The system for setting up a race is dead easy. All you have to do is cruise the streets looking for other players and when you come across one you reckon you can take, you give them a flash of your lights. Over on your opponent’s screen a challenge message will flash up and if they accept you both drop to the map where you both place your bets. Whoever is challenged gets to pick the start and finish points and then the game drops back to let you both get on with the race.
Now this is the clever bit. The online Oahu is really just one great big interactive lobby, so when you go into a race, you drop out of the multiplayer world so that just you and your opponent can get on and race. There’ll still be AI traffic to negotiate and other than the fact there’s no other human drivers around, you won’t notice any difference. But what this does do is make sure the race is as fair as possible as neither of you will have to contend with unpredictable human driver careening around or perhaps even mates of your foe trying to sabotage your efforts.
Where Test Drive Unlimited’s races differ from other racers is that though you might set your own start and finish points, hopefully playing to your advantages and your opponent’s weaknesses, there’s no actual course that you have to follow. How you actually get to the finish line is totally up to you. All the cars have a very nifty and comprehensive Sat Nav system which shows you the quickest route to wherever you want to go and this comes into it’s own in a race, giving you directions to the finish line even if you go haring off in the wrong direction.
So armed with this knowledge and motoring along on a Triumph Bonneville T100, I decided to challenge some bird in a Lotus. Now although this is early code, there were plenty of Atari guys and girls online to challenge as they’re all giving the game a thorough playtesting all the time. So the girl in the Exige accepted my challenge and set a course that would see us both belting up the freeway… Now I’m on a bike, she’s in a car so you’d think that although I’d be faster off the start, she’d eventually pull ahead of me. Luckily for me, the finish line was set in the oncoming lane of traffic, so all I had to do was blat down the narrow hard shoulder, leaving her to dodge and weave through oncoming cars… But sadly, my lead was short lived as I over corrected on a bend, drifted into traffic and got a major tank-slap going which saw me swerve across two lanes of oncoming traffic and into the central reservation… curses!
I was quickly remounted on the Triumph and shot off again but I had to take drastic action at an intersection and ended up the wrong side of the lane divider but at least I was clear of oncoming cars and didn’t have to worry about sudden stops caused by truck radiator grilles anymore. I gave it full throttle and pulled what I think was an incredibly impressive wheelie all the way along the street, getting the front wheel down in perfect time to slam into the back of a 4x4… and all this time the Exige was zipping further away. I’d like to say it was a close run race but when the message flashed up that the chick in the Lotus had won, I was still a fair way from the line so I have to admit I was soundly beaten. It’s a shame there’s no parallel parking challenges in multiplayer otherwise I’d have been able to even the score with her… ah well.
So that’s it then. Atari’s Test Drive Unlimited really is shaping up to be one hell of a game. It’s got more ‘real world’ stuff than you could shake a big stick at and has an online mode that’s to die for. It’s deceptive just how much depth there is to the game and the online MMO aspect is a stroke of sheer bloody genius. Add in the faithful mapping of an exotic location, the simply incredible detail in the cars, both inside and out, the amazing race challenge system, the cracking Sat Nav, the excellent car handling, the variety of driving experiences across the island, the built in challenges and the whole lifestyle ranking thing and you’ve got an absorbing mammoth of a game on your hands…
We were extremely privileged to have been given this early glimpse of the game and what we’ve seen so far makes us hungry for the finished version. Now, where did I leave the keys to my Ducati?
