Maybe it's because my last three vehicle purchases spanning ten years have been a four-wheel drive station wagon, a minivan and a better minivan, but the very title 'Test Drive' does very little to get me excited about playing a game. Having shaken off the notion of going around checking out rear under-seat storage and cup holders for the kids, I let my mind wander to the focus of the game - going really fast around the Hawaiian island of Oahu in really cool sports cars. Now that sounds much more like the basis of a fun game! In fact, it made me think of another 'test drive' I had - it was just over twenty years ago at my brother's wedding. I flew in from college for the whole weekend and took a shuttle to the hotel. I was very early and it was a nice fall day, so I hung around outside reading (this was well before there were any significant handhelds - or cell phones for that matter). A female friend of my mother came driving up fairly soon; she'd bought a brand new Corvette on a mid-life crisis whim and offered to let me drive it around the hilly roads of Woodstock, Vermont. While I couldn't drive very fast - and had no interest in getting a speeding ticket on the weekend of my brother's wedding - the feeling of raw power under the hood while driving through scenic New England roads in the fall was tremendous. Right, I think I'm sufficiently primed for this game now!

Test Drive Unlimited takes you on a thrill ride to someplace very pretty and shows you some wonderful cars - but that isn't what makes it a big deal. The coolest things about the game are that you get to drive around the entire island of Oahu and that the lines between single player and multiplayer have been blurred to the point of irrelevance. Take a second and let that sink in - because those two items are what make this game so cool. You will spend more than a few hours tooling around in races and challenges and minor missions, then look at the map, zoom out and realize that you have barely begun to see the whole island! The rest of the game is solidly executed, but without these items it wouldn't rise above the crowd of great looking racers - as it is, it's definitely worth a second look!

The visuals and sounds of Test Drive Unlimited are impressive, but just how impressive depends on your experience with other racing games. The game looks great - that much is for sure. It's very good at immersing you in the world of a driver who's cruising around the island. Everything looks wonderful; the roads, foliage buildings, water and pretty much anything else you might care to mention. I was able to maximize my graphics setting and see the wonders of Hawaii at 1900 x 1200 - and it all looked great. The cars themselves look very good as well; the attention to detail on the interiors and exteriors are simply amazing. However, there are some graphical issues; cars are amazingly shiny, and not always appropriately so - no matter what the lighting, you can be sure that your car will glisten from all angles. The relative size and shape of cars isn't quite right sometimes either, but it works well within the context of the game, especially when making those impossible passes at 155 miles per hour in a residential area.

The sound does a great job of making you feel like you're part of a living world. The engine sounds and general road noise are fantastic, as you would expect, but there are plenty of other great touches as well; the background noise increases as you hit congested streets and the horns sound with nice Doppler effects as you race down the wrong side of the road. The game also has a great radio system and even lets you very simply create your own custom radio stations. It was very interesting cruising around the big island while listening to the Gothic 3 soundtrack!

The game starts off with a small back story that shows you boarding an airplane to Hawaii, with your character having a vision of racing exotic sports cars around the island. At this point you get to select your character from those lounging around the waiting area and prepare for some action. You start off by renting a car, which gives you something decent to start with, but very quickly you'll be buying something better. Your first mission is to buy a house; you're directed to the local real estate office and given a couple of choices. These are enough to suit most tastes - and there will be plenty of opportunity to buy better houses later. This is perfect, because it allows you to get a solid feel for the controls before doing any real racing. After going to your house you need to buy a car; there are a few low-end dealerships around and you select one of these, then head there to pick out what you can afford. The car selection through the game is consistent, balancing what you can get in terms of speed and handling with what you can afford.

There's a ton of things to do around the island besides racing - there are missions to drive someone to a certain location in a specified amount of time, and delivery missions where you are responsible for safely driving a car from one location to another. There are minor sub-plots to accompany some of these, but mostly they are just passing events. The real meat of the game is the racing, naturally, which comes in the standard, club ladder and timed variety. Each offers a different challenge - racing is all about winning, but striving to immediately be first can sometimes work against you. You will develop tactics to help you be successful, race after race. Timed races are quite a different challenge - you have to work through normal traffic as quickly as possible, and every mistake slows you down; gold cups require near flawless execution throughout. All of this can be accessed through the map, which has a nice satellite-style image of the island where you can zoom right down to street level if desired. Areas you have already been to can be 'fast accessed', or you can just drive around to reach them. The controls are fairly simple and work pretty well, although it is obvious that a wheel controller would have done wonders for the game. The granularity of the arrow keys can be inadequate and adjusting down the sensitivity makes turns a chore and you occasionally feel like you are fighting the controls after a critical mistake. The worst example of this is when you reverse; this is overloaded to the brake function, so you need to very quickly switch between forward and backward motion, which occasionally fails and costs you precious seconds.

The first bothersome thing I found whilst playing was one of the first things I saw - the people. The character models in the opening sequences and whenever you have interactions for missions or purchases look very ordinary and blocky, and their movements don't look natural. Once driving, you will notice that there are no pedestrians, which is probably a good thing, since much of my early driving would have resulted in fatalities that would have immediately earned the game an 'adults only' rating! But what matters is not whether there are pedestrians, but whether there are cars to race - and there are! Things start to get a bit less great when you open up the world of motorcycles though; perhaps it would have been better to leave them out entirely, because while they look and sound like motorcycles, they feel more like really skinny cars. Nothing about their handling feels right, while crashes, which were so nicely done for cars, were pretty much skipped for motorcycles. That would be my recommendation - skip the motorcycles altogether.

I could spend an hour telling you about the fun to be had in multiplayer - but it would be a waste of both of our time, because the simple truth is this - if you have logged in with a multiplayer-enabled profile then you can go to the map and find a multiplayer race, which is the same as a single player but with a different color designation. It may look the same, but it is a world apart - each driver has their own personality, rubberbanding AI is gone and you really never know what the guy next to you will do! And that isn't the only feature - if you want to race a real-world player as you're driving down the street, just flash your lights and join in a race. It is an amazingly seamless implementation that really makes the game so much more enjoyable than it would otherwise have been. Unfortunately, for a game with 'unlimited' in its title, the availability of online races is very limited. Racing living drivers is so much more satisfying that you will seek out races tirelessly, finding very few along the way. I hope that the community continues to grow and adapt this game so that more players get the chance to experience being smoked by a truly excellent racer (that would not be me, by the way!)

In the end, Test Drive Unlimited is about having the ability to race amazing fantasy vehicles around an amazing fantasy island - and that core element works extremely well. You will want to enter races and complete missions in order to keep getting more cash to buy more cars across all classes, to enter more races in those classes to buy even better cars and then bigger houses to store those new cars in! It isn't the most realistic or graphically rich racing game, but the basic elements of having the entire island at your disposal at all times and having integrated online multiplayer make this a worthy addition to any racing fan's collection.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).