Rides and real estate

So you've done some races, collected some trophies and prize money and you have found some car dealers? It's time to start your own collection of cars. Car and bike dealerships dot the island and each dealer has his own selection of vehicles on sale. To unlock the bike dealers, you first have to visit every car dealer in the island. This also doubles as a nice tour of the play area and uncovers dozens of new challenges and missions.

Easy living, Test Drive style.

As your car collection grows, you will rapidly run out of garage space in your starting home. To fix this, you can trade up your house to a larger one, or just buy a second house - dozens of luxurious homes can be found around the island. At your homes you can check your progress and achievements, admire your car collection and change your characters' appearance. To unlock more character customization options, you can shop for new clothes and accessories around the island, but unlike car dealers and real estate agents, clothing stores require vouchers. To get these vouchers you must complete hitchhiker or supermodel missions where you drive a person to his or her destination in a hurry and without scaring him off by smashing into things along the way.

Want some M.O.O.R.?

218MPH, and on the wrong side of the road. This might hurt a bit.

Test Drive Unlimited also boasts a multiplayer component built into the game, dubbed M.O.O.R. - "Massively Open Online Racing". However, the system is not very massive. Yes, you can meet other players while driving around the island in free ride mode, and you can instantly challenge them to a race or just talk with them using built-in voice communications. But there is a catch - the M.O.O.R. system is limited to 8 players at once. That's all you are going to see at once, and in most cases all you see are names on the horizon. Servers will randomly match up to 8 players who happen to be driving in the same general area, and hook them up. While TDU is no MMO, the system is definitely something new.

The achievement system of the Xbox 360 version is also faithfully duplicated on the PC. You can also compare your times on all the races to worldwide ranking lists, and you can design and play player-created challenges or buy and sell second-hand cars on a player market. The island also has a wide selection of multiplayer races. You start them just like a single player race, but instead of immediately heading to the starting line, the system (in theory) pairs you with opponents to race against. While the in-game interface is slick and well-integrated to the game, it doesn't matter much as the multiplayer feature just isn't working at the moment. Most of the available multiplayer races have zero players available, and those who do have players seem to never start - you just get disconnected from the servers or the game informs that connection was lost to one of the players.

It's too bad that Test Drive Unlimited was released before Microsoft's Windows Live gaming service, as it would've been perfect candidate for cross-platform play on Live. While most of the functionality is duplicated with the GameSpy servers, problems with the online play are just inexcusable.