The needle passes 175mph and it’s time to change into sixth gear. Acceleration still building, the wind noise, once quiet, now a roaring tsunami, drowning out the MP3 radio channel being streamed into the cabin. The once wide twolane highway now resembles a tight winding country lane. Up ahead, a lumbering heavy goods vehicle snorts out a lungful of diesel and agonisingly stutters into the outside lane. At an indicated 198mph – the fastest speed you’ve ever driven – prudence prevails and the Jaguar shudders as you stomp hard on the anchors. But you’re still doing over a hundred as you rip past the truck, snatching fourth as the arrow-straight road drops to the valley floor towards the coast.

Test Drive Unlimited is perhaps the first racing sim that delivers the kind of gaming experience we all hoped the next-generation consoles would offer. It’s an epic and ambitious sprawling achievement that brings together almost all of the elements demanded by those of us who want more than just the inch-perfect circuit racing of Project Gotham Racing 3. The sort of gameplay hinted at by Need for Speed on 3DO, but never bettered.

Until now.

Lest we forget, TDU was created by the folks at Eden Games. They developed the simply superb Need For Speed: Porsche 2000 on PC, as well as the highly rated V-Rally games on PlayStation. These guys know their cars, and they understand what’s required from a racing game. And the heritage is obvious from the moment you slither into the driver’s seat and realise you can see your own feet on the pedals, adjust the seat for height and reach, and crank the engine into life before you set off. Fully detailed cockpits for every car are the icing on the cake. Anal details perhaps, but essential when creating the sense of realism that a petrolhead demands.

You begin the game at the airport on the way to the Hawaiian island of Oahu, and a decision about which character to choose and which hire car to rent (your first driven miles lead you to an estate agent to secure some lodgings) needs to be made. Once you have a home, you can kick back and chill when not driving, and your luxury pad is where you can check game stats, wander around your garage, alter game settings, and trade cars with other online players. As you earn cash from street racing or completing missions, more lavish abodes can be purchased from the estate agents on the island, each one grander than the next, and crucially, able to store more cars. The only thing stopping you from owning them all is a serious amount of racing prize money.

How much is enough? How many cars? How many houses? How much Ben Sherman gear can you possibly need? Answer – a lot.

If TDU teaches you one thing, it’s that too much is never enough, and with just under 100 cars, 64 properties, countless special challenges and over 1,000 miles of road, few games on the Xbox 360 offer this level of depth and long-term enjoyment. Quit your job, put Dominos Pizza on speed dial, and prepare for the ride of your life for the rest of your life.

Did we mention the cars? How does 90+ sound? The selection at the local dealers ranges from the sublime – Audis, Mercedes, Alfa Romeos, Fords, VWs – to the ridiculous, step forward Ferrari, McLaren, Lamborghini, Farboud, Koenigsegg, Saleen, Ascari and Pagani. And even Nick Mason from Pink Floyd is catered for with some classic metal, including his beloved Ferrari 250 GTO, Lamborghini Muira, Aston Martin DB4, Jaguar XJ220, Mercedes 300SL (Gullwing) and AC Cobra. It might be heresy to say, but the older cars are actually more interesting, as well as more challenging, to drive than the new models.

Find and visit all the car dealerships on the island and you are rewarded with the sudden appearance of three motorbike garages for Ducati, Kawasaki and Triumph. These mean little twowheeled monsters are devilishly difficult to master, but get it right, and say hello to 100ft wheelies, darting in and out of traffic, and of course some serious John Woo-style front wheel stunt antics. They’re not to everyone’s taste, but the bikes in TDU do offer a completely different racing style, and are a welcome addition – bring on the Harley-Davidson.

TDU is about far more than car pornography though, and like Grand Theft Auto; does a convincing job of creating a solid and believable realworld environment to wreck havoc in. The residents of Oahu go about their business, getting in your way, signaling for turns, stopping at red lights, and getting smashed to oblivion in stomachrending RTAs. You, sadly, emerge without a scratch, because it seems car manufacturers still have an aversion to seeing their latest models bent out of all proportion, and with Test Drive your vehicle remains utterly flawless amidst the carnage. Shame that.

Single-player challenges are littered across the island and come in four flavours – time trial, race, speed challenge and extra/custom, and as you complete the initial ones shown on the map, more appear with higher prize funds and greater levels of difficulty. Extra missions are where the real action is, and like GTA, they might be simple package delivery missions, hitchhikers needing a ride, dropping off a supercar to another location, or special races, like an entire lap of the island.

Tap the right analogue stick at any time and you are ripped from your car seat and catapulted 20,000 feet into the air above the island for a bird’s-eye view of the entire playing area. Eden Games has then cleverly allowed you to view the icons for challenges or important locations, such as your houses and car dealerships, using a simple filter system. Instead of wading through a screen packed with confusing symbols, you can turn everything off, and then display only items of interest when you need to find them.

Another thoughtful addition is that the game remembers exactly which roads you have driven already; allowing you to skip around the island from the main map without having to drive to familiar destinations manually. It may not sound like much, but with such a huge playing area, it’s reassuring to know you can cut out the mundane journeys when you need to. Something that is sorely lacking in real life.

The success of TDU comes down to the freedom it offers. Eden Games has clearly learnt that you can model the best cars in the world, perfect the handling, even get the engine note just right, but you will still get bored if you have to keep driving around the same old tracks. NFS: Porsche tried to remedy the problem with winding roads and varied routes instead of circuits, but TDU takes it to the next level, with a whole island, including towns, villages, mountains, freeways, airports and coastal roads. Every possible variation of road type, camber, bend and driving condition is on offer and it’s like having 100 personal Nurburgrings to race whenever you like.

A startling omission however, and one that the 360 could easily have handled, is the lack of darkness or any significant weather conditions. A shrewd use of the console’s internal clock and online connectivity could have seen the game replicate the actual conditions on Oahu itself. Why go eight tenths, and not the whole way?

Car handling takes some getting used to, and it’s a bit like owning your own pet raptor. Just when you think you’ve mastered it, it bites your head off! Depending on your skill level, handling is either frustratingly knife-edge, or far too forgiving. Arcade racers will hate the way you can’t hold a tyre-smoking powerslide at will, or the way the slightest inattention means you can lose control and plunge off the road. Purists may bemoan that the handling of each car is too generic and lacking character. It’s also inexplicable why the ability to look out of either side window in the in-car view is hampered by a treacle-like response time. You just want a quick look and then go.

Cornering initially feels numb regardless of what car you are driving, and although you get used to it, when there are so many stunning roads on offer, it seems a shame not to truly enjoy the handling of some of the world’s finest automobiles and their own intricacies. Are we the only ones to get a semi at the thought of four hours at the wheel of a Lamborghini Muira, for example? Thought so.

Take 2 is calling TDU a Massively Open Online Racer (MOOR) in an attempt to create a catchy new super-phrase and define this game’s online aspect. Actually it’s a bang-on description, and means as you tear-arse around Oahu, you can interact instantly with thousands of other players on Xbox Live. Players can be flagged down on the street, join in structured checkpoint races, and you can even meet at the local drive-in restaurants. Take 2 has also announced a steady stream of monthly downloadable car packs. TDU is certainly ‘massive’, in every sense of the word.

The potential of this game is truly staggering, particularly when you begin to realise the depth of the online play and how it seamlessly complements the single-player experience. Live aside, TDU offers the kind of challenge and repeat play seen only in the likes of Oblivion, but as soon as you’re broadband enabled the full potential is unlocked and you are treated to a world of on-the-spot challenges, racing other players’ custom racers, betting your cars, and car clubs. Unlimited gameplay, unlimited challenge, unlimited enjoyment.

GamerPoint hounds will find the rewards are geared towards offline play, and from time to time you will receive text messages announcing new status levels and bonuses based on criteria like distance travelled, number of cars/houses owned and cups won. It’s a rather clever as well as subtle reward system and one that always encourages you to put the hours in without it feeling like an endless treadmill. Success in the various challenges – time trials, races, speed tests, hitchhiker and delivery missions – means more than just trophies and cash however, and as you become a more seasoned driver, you will access new bonuses that enhance what you’ve already got, such as the ability to edit your character, respray your cars, take photos, and beef up the horsepower in specialist tune-up garages.

Once TDU is released, the online car trading market built into the game will really come into its own, and promises a dizzying array of ‘used metal’, though ‘careful lady owners’ may well be thin on the ground. On the early difficulty levels you can only purchase cars in standard colours and specification, but that all changes once you have access to the deluxe paint shops, which allow you to paint your cars any colour you like – from lurid pink to Amazonian tree frog green. Factor in three stages of tuning for all car makes, plus mileage recorded for each car, and suddenly you begin to realise how varied the online car market will be.

Despite over 30 high-definition hours of play for this review, there were only a few isolated instances of actual slowdown, though some pop-up was evident, particularly at high speeds. Not ideal, though rarely intrusive, but who knows what will happen when the servers go live? We’ll have to wait for the online review to find out.

So – the all-important question – will Test Drive Unlimited sell? It certainly deserves to. By the bucketload. But can a game that is this detailed, this accurate, this uncompromising to gamers who appreciate all things automotive, actually appeal to the mainstream as well? It’s possible TDU could be seen as a paradox. Too much of a simulation to appeal to the Gotham-obsessed arcade racers who use the barriers instead of brakes. Yet over-simplified for the diehard car nuts (ourselves included) who want full-on damage, and cars that are as individual to drive as they look.

In fact, the truth is that Test Drive Unlimited is the perfect compromise between the two. An intense racing simulation that goes way beyond anything that has ever been attempted before, in terms of scale and detail. And yet something that can easily be enjoyed by a complete novice. Hardcore players come for the on-the-limit handling and empire-building. Casual ones just like smashing into things and being chased by the police.

Should you buy Test Drive Unlimited? The unequivocal answer is yes. Seriously, you will not play a more polished or playable or realistic racing game on any other console out there, and it sets new standards of excellence on Xbox 360. We can safely say that Test Drive Unlimited is the new King of racing games.

Damian Butt