Reviewed: April 19, 2007
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Atari

Developer
Melbourne House
Eden Studios

Released: March 21, 2007
Genre: Racing
Players: 1

8
8
7
8
8.3

Supported Features:

These games were also the first in what Atari branded MOOR, or Massively Open Online Racer, where at any time you would be driving around with thousands of other real gamers in real-time. It was a bold concept that surprisingly worked and has kept me behind the wheel since the 360 version launched last year. I even have my own car club.

Obviously, things had to be cut back a bit when scaling this massive game down to the PSP, but it’s not nearly as bad as you might imagine. The entire island of Oahu is still present and the streaming load-free gameplay is still just as addictive as ever. Even more surprising is that if you have a broadband wireless Internet connection you can join thousands of other PSP owners also driving around Oahu at any given time, essentially making this the first MMO title for the PSP.

Test Drive Unlimited holds true to its namesake, offering unparalleled freedom of choice and unlimited potential. You can go anywhere and do just about anything at anytime. There is a massive choice of vehicles, hundreds of races, and millions of dollars of prize money waiting for you in sunny Hawaii.

You’ll access most of the game content through an overhead satellite map of the island complete with color-coded icons indicating various events around the island. These are divided into timed challenges, speed courses, and a variety of other race types like maintaining a high average speed through a course of radar speed traps. Races also come with various vehicle restrictions to keep things fair.

You can always select the next event or simply allow the game to choose the next closest one you quality for. You can also choose to drive to that event or simply warp to the location provided you have already unlocked that portion of the map by having already driven there. It’s a nice timesaving device that rewards you for early exploration.

There is a police presence on the island but they aren’t concerned with speeding as much as hit and run. If you hit too many cars your wanted level will increase and the police will start to hunt you down. My record for a single pursuit is six days of gameplay (or about 9 hours) before they finally caught me and gave me a whopping ticket. Once you enter a race event the cops aren’t a factor, but you can be sure they’ll be waiting for you when the event kicks you back into casual driving mode.

A few key elements from the 360 and PC have been sadly removed. You no longer have a personal connection with your driver. You can’t go shopping for clothes or do any of those fun personal missions like driving supermodels around town or deliver vintage cars to the other side of the island. Impromptu multiplayer challenges are now much more restrictive. You can no longer plot your own waypoints and send them to your opponent. Now you must select from a few designer challenges.

Motorcycles are also gone from the game. The Xbox 360 actually used the Achievement point system to track your progress through the game. The PSP offers a similar point system that rewards you with winning races and doing stylish moves like drifting, drafting, and catching some occasional air. These points will unlock new races when you acquire enough of them.

While the PSP makes a valiant attempt to recreate the online experience it doesn’t come close to the other versions. You are limited to only four cars in any given race and the game will continually refresh the maps making it hard to keep the same people on your map. There are tools for finding and locking in your friends and creating a friends list, but these are not that intuitive, and even after you iron out all the matchmaking details, the actual racing is choked full of lag and skipping cars.

But even despite the lacking online experience, Test Drive Unlimited offers a lengthy solo experience that will take you months to exhaust and the game is pure joy to drive and play. The analog steering is perfect and you can really connect with the physics of each of the vehicles you’ll be driving, even if there are some weird collision issues with environmental objects.

The car models are excellent, even if there is no car damage, with smooth curves and realistic animations for physics as they careen around sharp turns. Headlights blind you with lens flares and the world comes alive with foliage, blue skies, white puffy clouds, and enough architecture to have you believing somebody lives on this island.

But what impressed me the most is the sheer scale of this game. The entire island of Oahu with hundreds of miles of roads are all here in your PSP and you can drive anywhere without seeing a single load screen. The only time you’ll see a load is if you warp to a new location and bypass the streaming process.

The soundtrack on the PSP features a few dozen obscure licensed tracks, none of which I had ever heard of. It wasn’t exactly bad music but it wasn’t anything I could really get into. It helps to fill in what would otherwise be a very sterile sound experience, so I guess it works well enough in that regard.

The online modes seems to be getting a bit better from the time I started playing the game to now, during this review. Some of the lag is going away or at least getting shorter, but the simple fact is that the PSP version just can’t mirror the seamless MMO environment of the console and PC. But I’ll give the designers props for trying.

But for those looking for a fun, challenging, and quite massive racing experience in the lush tropical setting of Hawaii, look no further than Test Drive Unlimited. It’s an experience you won’t soon forget.