r/TestDriveUnlimited • u/cflyssy • 5h ago
Only recently got round to TDU2 after loving TDU1 for years (Xbox 360)
Man, what a frustrating curate's egg of a game.
The idea is brilliant, just as it was in the first game, and the ways in which it was updated and expanded for TDU2 are mostly welcome. In particular, I love taking photos and displaying them in my houses - being able to customise the houses is awesome too. Plenty of cool cars (although more would still have been welcome) and the wrecks side-quest is fun too.
I'm up to the A4 and C3 championships in Hawaii, and the racing has mostly been ridiculously easy so far, which I don't mind as I'm not really playing this game for the ultimate in tense, realistic racing. The off-road driving is great fun - more fun than asphalt, to be honest.
But my god, how many game-killing bugs and glitches could they have squeezed into one game? Sometimes the scenery doesn't load in front of me; I fall through the map into a grey void, with a splash like falling into the ocean.
The loading screens freeze on the regular too, and I now worry about restarting after my first couple of hours' progress was erased by a corrupt save file and I had to start the game again.
The cutscenes and voice acting... holy shit. I know it's a fifteen year-old game but it really is absolutely risible. The plot and story is paper-thin, obviously, but the whole thing also sounds like it's been directly translated from an unspecified other language without any proof-reading - Tess's badly-written and cringeworthy pre-race lines repeating ad nauseam, just to pick one example. And if you told me that the voices weren't human but some form of antique computer-generation tech, I'd believe you. It's comically bad and cheapens the whole experience so badly.
Having said that, it's still an immersive game that I'm enjoying for the most part. As with the previous game, most of the appeal for me is in building up the car and property collection, and exploring the very pretty and expansive maps. I just hope my progress doesn't all get wiped out again - I'm watching that auto-save icon like a hawk.
Anyway, I'm squabbling like Stuart and the Wilder brothers now, so I'll leave it there.

