Test Drive

In the end, after waiting for months and months in anticipation, Test Drive turned out to be a fantastic racing game filled with fun, fun, and fun! Visually, it's a great title to look at. The cars look nice, and the environments are flowing with nice details. The gameplay consists of excellent sense of speed, and the replay value is jammed with great modes, including the Underground story mode, Drag Race mode, Navigation Challenge mode, and Cop Chase mode. There are a slew of tracks and vehicles to choose from, and lastly the controls are wonderfully done. If you're strictly into simulation, avoid Test Drive. Otherwise, if you're as big a racing genre fan as I am, by all means go on and get this game, right away, you won't regret it.

Finally, there are two other points worth mentioning. The first is that Test Drive has a truly eclectic selection of music, but unlike a lot of games these aren't throwaway tracks. With tracks by Moby, Ja Rule, DMX, and Saliva there is probably something to satisfy a variety of gamers. The other notable item is that, once again, Pong has been included as a diversion during the epically long load screens.

Test Drive takes an urban tour of underground racing. Sometimes you just want to drive. You want to jump into your car and jam on the accelerator. That’s Test Drive. This is straight-ahead fast and furious Xbox racing that doesn’t offer a lot of frills but instead enables you to smash machinery and tear up scenery. You can drive 20 cars including sports jobs like the Lotus Elise and the Jaguar XK-R, or American muscle cars like the Chevy Camaro Z28 or the good ol' Pontiac G.T.O. The four target cities are San Francisco, Tokyo, London, and Monte Carlo.

The best advice I can give to anyone thinking about buying Test Drive is to take it for a test drive yourself. It is a fantastic racing game, but give it a rental, you'll know right away if the rubber band A.I. is too much for you to take. I was able to mostly get over it and have a great time with Test Drive, others might not be able to. But all racing game fans should take their own Test Drive.

An overall solid production and a merit to the developers who programmed it, Test Drive does a lot of things right. The weight differential between automobiles, the excellent visual presentation, and superbly planned track design to name a few. But with a little extra planning however, it could have ascended to the next level and been something great.

Test Drive comes off like an extremely mediocre arcade game that, yet again, suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. I'm not sure if the physics were arcadey and the gameplay was too much like a driving sim or if it's the other way around, but the two don't synch up the way they should. With so many other racing options already available on the Xbox and more on the way before the end of 2002, it's hard to find a place where Test Drive truly belongs. Test Drive's career mode is the strongest element and worth a look, but Burnout does pure arcade action better, Rallisport Challenge simulates driving better and Project Gotham Racing straddles the fence better than Test Drive does. I'd recommend it as a poor man's version of PGR, but that penniless bastard has to cough up the same $50 to play it so it's not really an option.

Ultimately, Test Drive is a nice effort, but it does not have anything to make it stand out from the pack. What it offers is sufficient, but it is not going to tear someone away from the likes of Project Gotham Racing or Gran Turismo 3.

If not for the slowdown, this would be a great, highly recommended game. Looks good and sounds great, but in a racing game to have the sensation of speed constantly interrupted is very damaging. I recommend it for avid racers, but otherwise rent it. I played the Xbox version, which looks a bit better and has no slowdown issues and it ROCKS! That’s what this game could have been.

I wish I could take out individual parts of this game and throw away the rest. Test Drive is new for PS2, but for the most part it's still the same old game. It's a decent buy, but only if you have an endless amount of patience. Patient-less gamers should rent it instead.

Test Drive needed this reboot, and the gritty, underground-racing angle isn?t bad; it just doesn?t feel as thrilling or daring as it should. This could have been The Fast and the Furious: The Game, but even with a narrative and some video segments, the game leaves the player wanting more. It still merits a rent to see for yourself.

Test Drive starts off as an impressive Xbox game. It has no pretenses, and it doesn't try to be anything other than what it is--a purely arcade-style racing game in the vein of Cruis'n USA and San Francisco Rush, meaning crashes are practically harmless and the laws of physics hardly apply. And it's fun for a while. The problem is that it's far too arcadelike for its own good, and it really only lends itself to short amounts of time spent playing. After a few races, you'll start to notice problems, the most obvious and detrimental of which is the terrible rubber band AI.

If you can overlook the cheap AI, you'll probably get some enjoyment out of Test Drive. It's true that Test Drive doesn't bring anything new to the table, but it is fun for a while and has plenty of cars and some good-looking tracks. It's short enough that it could be finished in a weekend, though the fun head-to-head mode adds some replay value if you have others to play with. All in all, it's worth checking out if you're a fan of arcade racing games.

In the end, it’s in the back of the pack in the world of racing games. Test Drive is a nice try by Pitbull Syndicate and Infogrames, what it offers is so-so, but it is not going to ever come close to the some games like of Project Gotham Racing or Gran Turismo 3.

Despite these noteworthy gains, Test Drive remains a conspicuously mediocre chapter in a perpetually flaccid series of arcade-racing games. Whether you label it Test Drive or Test Drive 7, this vehicle is still in desperate need of an engine overhaul.

It took me less than two days to complete the single-player campaign and unlock all of the vehicles. After that, the game pretty much becomes a drag, since there will be no further challenges for the player and given that the game's graphics are not all that impressive either, there's nothing left to draw you back into that "fast and furious" racing atmosphere. Hence, I wouldn't give a nickle for its replay value (the game doesn't have a proper MP mode - you can only play in split-screen once the SP campaign is finished). For me, the only satisfying thing was breezing through the campaign and the challenges; once I finished that, there were precious little reasons for me to come back to this game, save for snapping off a few screenshots for this review.

Test Drive winds up a mixed bag of intense and exciting racing action which suffers terribly from a total lack of extras and is beset by weak collision physics, bad camera angles and crappy load times. Still, there's enough fun in this game to recommend it for a quick spin around the block.