Well, the short answer is: yes. The biggest selling point of Test Drive Unlimited is the unique way in which the game is presented. Instead of option and menu screens, you’re given a GTA-style sandbox of a world to scoot about in. The entire real island of Oahu is yours to drive around at your leisure in, and is recreated with the kind of detail and accuracy that would make the Project Gotham Racing team proud. The island itself is huge, (it takes around an hour to just drive around the edges), let alone the miles and miles of road packed inside it. Much like GTA, races and events are scattered all across the island, but before you can do anything, you must create a character.
What racing game is complete without a Ferrari?
When you first turn on the game, you find yourself at an airport, booked on a flight to Oahu. It’s from here that you choose the base design for your character from half a dozen male and female co-passengers. Once you’ve decided on your character, you can pretty much edit them however you want. Hair, eyes, nose, mouth, and ears are all highly customisable. Even things like the size of your cheeks and the length of your chin can be altered too. Clothes, shoes and accessories can also be changed to suit your tastes. By scouring the island, you’ll even find many clothes shops, each offering something a bit different from the others.
It’s not just clothes shops you’ll find though - there’s plenty of car dealerships scattered around Oahu. Most of your favourite luxury cars are here, from Ferraris and TVRs to Lamborghinis and Aston Martins. Plus, using the various upgrade and paint shops, you’ll be able to customise your cars to your own liking. The upgrades do seem somewhat pointless in all honesty; the game offers three stages of upgrades, but there's no real incentive to not just go for the biggest upgrade straight away. The paint shop on the other hand is rather wonderful, as it allows you to not only paint your car with any colour you desire, but also gives you the option of two tone paint, which can often look dazzling. Of course, you’re going to need somewhere to store all these wonderful cars, so luckily you can obtain houses through the estate agents.
Naturally, none of this is free - you have to earn it all by winning money in any of the dozens and dozens of races found on the island, and there’s an impressively wide variety of events on offer too. For starters, you’ve got standard time trials where you simply have to reach the goal before the time runs out, as well as checkpoint versions of this. There are 1v1 head to head races, plus bigger races with up to six racing at once. There are non-racing based events too, such as the speed camera challenges where you have to beat a top speed or, more frequently, have to build up an accumulated average speed by passing as fast as you can through a selection of carefully-placed speed cameras. These can all be complicated further by adding traffic to the road or enforcing an ‘off-road’ meter that punishes you for every second spent off the road.
However, the biggest money earner is when you're asked to transport various luxury cars safely across vast distances to a repair shop. These have no time limit, but often have you travelling many miles of busy roads packed with traffic, so it’s a more of a test of patience than driving skill. An early mission where you have to transport a Ferrari Enzo sticks in the mind. Simple delivery of the car will net you $90,000, but avoid leaving the road or damaging the car in any way and you’ll pocket $120,000, while similarly themed hitchhiker and package delivery missions will reward you with vouchers to use in any of the clothes shops.
Because we all know shopping for clothes is more fun than shopping for cars...
The killer aspect of Test Drive Unlimited is its online integration. As you play through the single player missions, you're actually already part of the multiplayer world. Drive out of your garage and within seconds you’ll be bumping into real players all doing the same as you. It’s not just for show of course; flash your lights by tapping the A button, and you can challenge any nearby driver to a race. Should they accept, you can set the route you will race on and a stake to race for. Unlike the 360’s current premier racing game PGR3, collisions are dealt with much more fairly – no silly spin outs with every minor touch here. If you do find a good racer you can ‘lock’ them to you via the d-pad, which also works for people on your Friends list too. When you’ve managed to ‘lock’ a good group of people, you can then choose to ‘isolate’ them, meaning the rest of the outside world is cut off and you're left to race alone.
A step up from this is the Car Clubs. For an initial start-up cost, you can set up a club and invite people into it. Here you can not only set up races between yourselves much more easily, but also races against other car clubs. And the online portion of the game still doesn’t stop there, either. Not only can you buy and sell cars online, but you can also create custom challenges for people, setting your best time on your own customised route and then posting it up on the Test Drive Unlimited server, which theoretically means the game has a near infinite number of challenges. Providing you’re willing to put up the prize money, you can actually set an entrance fee for the challenge so if your time is good enough it could become a good little earner for you.
The amount of content in Test Drive Unlimited can be a little overwhelming at first, but that’s certainly a good thing. The fact we’re already near the end of the review and have yet to mention the excellent GPS navigation system or the ‘not too serious but not too arcadey’ PGR3-esque handling just goes to show how good this game is. There are some minor complaints to be had. Firstly, it takes a little too long for the challenges to actually be a challenge, while some of the missions have strange difficulty spikes now and again. One particular pair of speed challenges were especially memorable. One took over an hour of retries to do and was worth $15,000, while a similar mission just a few hundred yards down the road was worth $40,000 and could be beaten with ease every time.
Secondly, the difference in handling between the cars isn’t as great as it could have been, while the handling of the motorbikes feels somewhat tacked on. The bikes on the whole are a bit disappointing actually, completely lacking any sort of crashing animation when things go wrong. The final complaint is in regards to the Oahu police. Quite why they were included is a mystery, as they only serve to annoy. Driving 225mph on the wrong side of the road in a Saleen doesn’t seem to bother them, but accidentally clip a car, and they’re straight after your blood. If you hit anything else in this time, it’s not long before your 'wanted' rating shoots up and you’re staring a $40,000 fine in the face.
Yay, more Ferraris!
Visually the game is impressive, though this is more to do with its sheer size and consistent look, rather than any high-end graphical wizadry. The car models (including the in-car view), while not quite PGR3 standard, still look rather tasty on the whole. The island itself suffers from some shocking pop-up, but the framerate is solid, and it doesn’t stop it being simply beautiful at times. Although the game doesn’t use a real-time clock or weather effects, it certainly has its moments when the sun is beaming through the trees at the right angle or setting on the horizon of the sea. The sound is easily the weakest area of the game, thanks to some forgettable music and wooden voice-acting. But it's nothing a custom soundtrack and a sense of humour can’t fix.
Test Drive Unlimited breathes quality in almost every area and is arguably one of the biggest surprises of the year. If you don’t have a Xbox Live Gold subscription, you can knock a bit off the final score as its online integration is what really helps make this game special. Packed full of content and customisation, there’s plenty here for your money. All racing game fans should check this out immediately.
EA Trax are forced on you from the moment the first menu shows up, at least in Test Drive you have to physically turn on the radio when you're driving. It's not that Test Drive's soundtrack is in any way offensive, it's just made up of alot of unknown artists and is rather forgettable as a result. The custom soundtrack works well anyway, cutting out whenever there's voice acting/cutscenes, so just use that 
Bring it on! 
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