Unlimited Driving In Ibiza and Hawaii

With 77 and a half hours and 69% of the game complete, I finish the last of the single-player events in Test Drive Unlimited 2. It can be relaxing to drive the vast roads of Ibiza and Hawaii in a cool car, but the game has a lot of stuff to do and most of it is the same. One event type that exemplifies this are the several lap-based eliminator races in the game's single-player championships. With 7 other competitors and circuits that last at least a minute, the eliminator races are lengthy affairs where you hope that you don't mess up a corner at the wrong time.

Another misfire in the game include an attempt at having story and characters. There isn't much of a plot other than win the championship and the characters you meet along the way are annoying. There is a big player character component to the game where you can buy houses and clothing. You don't have to engage in these aspects of the game to go further in something else in the game.

The cars and the driving are the main attraction of the game and they are quite good. The visuals aren't great like in Dirt 3 or Shift 2 Unleased but they are decent enough considering the large drivabable land mass in the game. With some control tuning, I got a good feel out of the cars. One thing I wasn't able to fix are the cars annoying habit to default to neutral gear when using an automatic gearbox. The car selection isn't as big as the areas you can drive in but there is a variety of muscle cars, sports cars, and super cars.

There is a lot of stuff to do in Test Drive Unlimited 2. That's a blessing and a curse in that there is a great variety of content but a lot of it isn't as complex or meaninful as you might want. While it was fun picking any random road and drive, it would have been better if this open-world driving game was a bit more focused.