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Test Drive Unlimited

If you have ever dreamed of driving a shiny new supercar on a sunny day, cruising along a Hawaiian highway at leisurely 200 miles per hour, but just haven't been able to do it - either due to local laws, lack of a supercar or the perfectly understandable fear of ending up wrapped around a lamp post along the way, Test Drive Unlimited is just the game for you.

The developers, Eden Games, have set their sights pretty high and definitely raised the bar for the driving games genre. Test Drive Unlimited models the entire Hawaiian island of Oahu in superb detail. That's 1000 miles of open road to drive around, everything from six-lane highways to small winding two-lane mountain roads. To get around, the game offers a wide selection of rides. While you can find some historic cars and a couple of motorbikes, most of the available cars are expensive supercars - Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis, TVRs... 90 different cars in all, with more on the way as downloadable add-ons.

Test Drive Unlimited is a very open-ended game. You arrive to Honolulu on a plane, rent a car, drive to a real estate agent and buy a house. Then you pick a cheap car from one of three available manufacturers, drive a quick introductory race, and you are off to do whatever you want. You can just drive around the huge island sightseeing, or you can get on with the game, and look up the available challenges near by. There are hundreds of tasks and missions littered around the island; each one is labeled with a skill level and most are limited to certain class of cars or bikes.

Challenges vary in style - sometimes you just need to beat the clock, sometimes you race up to 8 opponents. The challenge may also happen in the middle of normal traffic instead of closed roads. In some races your objective is just to reach a certain average speed across a set of speed traps or to reach a specific top speed. Race length also varies from a short hop to an hour-long marathon around the whole island. Amateur level races are mostly very short, doable in a couple of minutes, but as your rank rises, the available races become longer and more challenging. As an alternative to racing-style challenges, there are missions that require you to transport a car (preferably undamaged) for a client, or to deliver a package under a tight time limit. These missions pay very well, but are not repeatable.

As you participate in challenges and missions, the game tracks the roads you have covered. Any new challenges, missions or shops along those roads will open up for you to visit instantly via the map interface, and you can return instantly to any point of any road you have visited once. While you can explore the island and search out new challenges that way, you can also just keep doing the ones already visible - any roads you drive are counted for the map, so new things to do keep popping up naturally as you collect trophies and complete missions.

All vehicles are fitted with a GPS unit to direct you to your destination. At high speeds it has a habit of telling you about an intersection around the time you already zoomed past it at 200MPH+, but that's just realism - at 55 MPH it works fine!

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