Ibiza and Hawaii (more precisely, O'ahu) are mapped exactly to their real-life counterparts certainly, there are some liberal interpretations of the buildings and terrain, but the roads essentially correspond one-to-one – it takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to drive around an entire island (take your pick). Otherwise, the single-player is best as a pleasure cruise. Add in phone calls that are as irritating as those in Grand Theft Auto IV, Event side missions with women that nag about driving carefully when the point should be to drive fast, and a cloyingly obnoxious GPS system that loves to spew out “You're driving in the wrong direction!”, and the entire game needs a healthy shot of shut the hell up. The voice-acting, however, is remarkably off-putting: The host Tess Wintory snobbishly prattles on like she's in front of the camera all the time and the rest of the competitors, who follow the player along in every race, are just as annoying. The rags-to-riches plot is tolerable, revolving around the player's transformation from a lowly valet attendant to a slick racer with a penthouse and adoring fans. Strangely, though, players don't have the option to tweak their avatar's face at the beginning of the game, nor is there the option to select a Latino, other than choosing one of the "other" dudes and changing their skin color through plastic surgery. By mastering each level of classic, off-road, and asphalt racing, players earn the street cred and the cash needed to purchase new cars in dealerships, tune cars in various shops, acquire new threads for their avatar, and even get plastic surgery (after which the player's face is wrapped in bandages for 24 in-game hours). Test Drive Unlimited 2 is meant to have equally strong single-player and multiplayer components that weave together seamlessly.īut before players delve into clubs and multiplayer modes, they must first earn a set of wheels by completing license tests at a driving school and winning competitions in the dubbed Solar Crown racing competitions spread across the islands of Ibiza and, after reaching a certain level, Hawaii. Burnout Paradise's beautifully gritty, adrenaline-fueled racing gave players the option of stopping the single-player campaign every once in a while for multiplayer sessions, but it was mainly a solo ride. Its promise of a console MMO is indeed a lofty one, though it isn't entirely new. The reason for giving Test Drive Unlimited 2 the benefit of the doubt is its concept – the high-life fantasy of the racing aficionado, an island paradise where the Mercedes-Benz is but another luxury car cruising along the beachside highway and where drivers dress in suits and elegant sportswear that belong on the covers of Vanity Fair and GQ. But seeing the potential that it had, I decided to postpone my judgment until now, though it still should have gone through open beta. Their assessments aren't unfair since they're based on the facts at the time, when TDU2 should have remained in open beta. So it is by no stretch of the imagination that the typical scores for Test Drive Unlimited 2 have averaged between a 6 and a 7. Meanwhile, reviewers are inherently pressured to deliver their critiques as soon as possible, hopefully well before the release date or at least by the embargo date, no matter the glitchiness or eventual patching that might take place. Test Drive Unlimited 2 has had the misfortune of having many of its multiplayer features disabled, particularly clubs – the equivalent of guilds – that of the time of this writing still remains locked due to an exploit Eden Games is attempting to fix. The benefit of looking back with 20/20 hindsight cannot be underestimated, especially since the game at hand is an MMO – a racing MMO for the console, no less, but still deeply embedded in a genre whose titles tend to experience at least one week of glitches after launch, alongside angry fans and unapologetic reviews. To justify this review being two weeks past the release date of Test Drive Unlimited 2, I feel the need to express and expose how a small part of the reviewing process works at Game Revolution and the industry in general.
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