Playing through games history one game at a time, sometimes seismic changes are immediately noticeable. Playing Grand Theft Auto III or Super Mario 64 or Knight Lore, it was obvious how they led shifts to new ways of doing things. Some changes are more a matter of slow tectonic drift, and so the chance to mention them never comes up. Or at least never comes up until a game ditches years’ worth of slowly building conventions in one go and is suddenly rendered archaic.
One of the nicer shifts of the 2000s, which has continued since, was a move towards greater accessibility. It started off unevenly, where whether you got the option of subtitles was a coin toss, and slowly the games without it became the outliers, to the point where in the context of 2011 it came as quite a shock that Test Drive Unlimited 2 has no subtitles. Even worse, though, is the fact that it has first person sections and yet no option to invert its camera controls. That feels prehistoric.
It’s also odd, because Test Drive Unlimited 2 is not a game that cuts corners in other ways. Its menus and interface elements look good; its driving experience is enjoyable if more on the simple side. Its rendering of Ibiza looks suitably lovely and, in line with the series’s selling point, is impressively enormous. All the more so considering there’s a whole other island later on. You can spend a long time driving from one end of Ibiza to another, taking in the sun-bathed sights and discovering shops along the way. Discoveries play into an up-to-date approach to the open world, with a carefully configured set of experience meters to fill up in different ways alongside earning money for new cars.
It even cracks the moment-to-moment of driving around in a different but equally impressive way to Burnout Paradise, giving you not new missions on every corner but instead an escalating game of chicken to play with oncoming traffic. Near misses fill up a bar to earn you money, but the catch is that as it goes to ever-increasing amounts, you have the choice whether to bank your winnings or keep going. A single mistake sets you right back to zero. Picking your moment to end a sequence is a matter of comparable skill and precision to picking your way through gaps between dawdling vans.
Aside from traffic-dodging, your skills in sports cars and off-road vehicles come into play through different championships you earn by completing licence tests, with the tests a snack-sized taste of Gran Turismo. There is nothing at all revelatory in the various time trials and races that the championships are assembled from, with the closest to a new idea being a refinement of the speed camera trials from assorted Need for Speed games. Nonetheless, as challenges the championships are well put together, with difficulty pitched right and making unshowy use of the varied map.
Where the experience of Test Drive Unlimited 2 ties up to its limitations is in what else it adds on. Perhaps developers Eden Games were right to suspect that great driving on a big map wasn’t enough on its own to stand out, but that’s about where the right decisions there end. It’s 2011, the game says, we need a narrative. A sense of place. Some aspirational lifestyle elements which talk about aspirational lifestyle elements.
So, you can work to earn your way up to big luxurious houses and buy new outfits. And much of it, along with the story is handled through low-tech first person sections with plasticine-looking people (luckily given the control issues, looking up or down is rarely necessary).
There are unconvincing dance parties, obnoxious television intros, and numerous rivals who have failed auditions for another Need for Speed game. All of this had became old hat for a reason, and yet here it is. As if the time-warp to 2005’s wall-to-wall Juiced and Midnight Club wasn’t already full-force enough, one rival is an honest-to-goodness Paris Hilton parody. In the context of a sensibility that outdated, the archaic lack of options comes as less of a surprise than that the game has anything new and enjoyable to bring at all.
Top of the charts for week ending 12 February 2011:
