Fun, but repetitive and frustrating after a while
posted by MikeF73 (NORWALK, CT) Jan 28, 2008
Member since Oct 2006
25
out of
34
gamers (74%) found this review helpful
This game has a lot of potential, but some highly questionable design decisions turn it into a grind after a while. On the plus side, the map is quite large and there is a lot of area to explore. There are a ton of different ways to race and crash, both offline and online with friends.
After you've played for a little while though, things start to grind to a halt. There is basically no menu navigation at all in the game. They made it so events are tied to specific locations on the map. This is a neat idea and Test Drive Unlimited pulled it off nicely - once you find an event you can either drive there to start it, or pull it up from a menu and run it that way.
But in this game, the only way to run a race is to drive all the way to the specific intersection where that race starts. If you want to switch cars, you have to drive to the nearest junkyard. If you screw up in the middle of a race or time trial, you have to drive all the way back to the start of the race to try again.
This isn't bad at first when there are a whole lot of events around. If you mess up, you can just go to the nearest intersection and try a different race. But later in the game when you're trying to unlock specific cars or finish the last few events it gets VERY VERY frustrating. This also holds true for events that finish in a distant corner of the map -- you have to drive the same long route back to the city just to get to an event that you haven't completed yet.
A simple menu with restart race/select event/switch car options like you see in every other racing game would have made the game so much more enjoyable. It's a shame really. Maybe they'll come to their senses and patch it.
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