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Scores in this massive event are earned for your average speed on each track, with points being withheld for hitting walls or being pulled over by the Earn a first place and you're going to unlock cars, tracks, and different stuff. Obviously, this is something I didn't manage to complete, and I'm not ashamed. It's really hard. The closest thing Test Drive has to a practice mode is the Time Trial selection in which you pick a car, and a track and race for a final time. As far as I could see, finishing first here doesn't seem to do anything for you at all.
Fair enough, this is pretty easy stuff. Even more basic is the Drag Race where you select a car, and one for the computer and then try and get to the finish line first. Keep in mind that there are no automatics here, this is a contest to see who's got the better car and shifting ability. Last but not least comes Cop Chase, a play mode that's pretty much the opposite of that found in Need For Speed 3.
Here you select from a fairly short list of police cars and hit a track hell-bent on giving a little bit of justice to all of the racers on the road. Each one of the felons has been charged with crimes that range from chicken plucking to murder one. In order to pull them over, you've got to reduce their damage bars down to the red and then get 'em stopped with your siren going. It's a lot harder than it sounds, so you shouldn't expect to get a lot of points on this game until you've gotten adept at passing and crushing other cars.
The most important part of any racing game is how the cars handle, and here Test Drive fares pretty well. We used the keyboard, joypad, and steering wheel when testing this title, and all of them seemed to work delightfully. The cars all handle fairly well, although at high speeds they seem to drift a little bit unrealistically. Still, what the hell would I know? I've never driven a Viper at mph before. In addition to your standard brakes, which you need to be VERY easy with, Test Drive 5 also provides you with a handbrake that's perfect for power sliding around those hairpin turns.
It's a delicate art and one that none of us ever mastered it completely. In fact, both Julian and I we're the two who played the most found Test Drive 5 to be a very difficult game to play, but not always in a frustrating way.
It just takes a long time to learn how to handle the cars properly. But don't get too cocky, once you get the hang of driving the car, you'll still have to master driving in the snow or rain, both of which present their own special problems like lack of vision and lack of traction respectively. Unfortunately, all of this solid play is ruined by the way the computer plays its game. The biggest problem with Test Drive 5 is that it cheats.
The one you'll notice first is car to car impacts. When you're racing, if another car pulls up behind you and taps you on the rear bumper, your car immediately goes flying out of control. While this seems reasonable if a tad excessive , the same trick just doesn't work if you try to do it back. Shove an opponent's car from behind, and you're a lot more likely to end up in the ditch than he is. Next comes the differentiation in car acceleration and top speeds, something that becomes immediately noticeable in the Drag Race mode.
When you race against the computer, they're able to make a car perform in ways that you could never manage. They can reach accelerate cars faster than you can, and they can reach and maintain top speeds under conditions that would send you flying off the track.
Finally, comes the police factor. In a standard race, all a policeman has to do is get in front of you and you're automatically pulled over. In the police chase mode, you have to batter the hell out of a criminal to get them to stop, something that can be difficult at best when each impact sends you flying out of control.
The last of these problems I can forgive. In order for the police chase mode to be challenging, some liberties had to be taken. But the first two problems seem to be a way to give the computer opponents an advantage in competition.
A much better way to keep the game challenging during races would have been to create AIs that, while hampered by the same restrictions as you, were good enough to make you sweat. The way it is, the most you'll get is about three or four races before the computer pulls a dirty trick so foul that you'll turn your computer off in disgust. Okay, now that I've gotten that off my chest whew! Straight out of the box Test Drive 5 offers up sixteen different cars, some of which I have been waiting to drive for a very long time.
The addition of these classics has been a looooong time coming. I'm also fairly sure there's a couple of cars in the game that Accolade doesn't tell us about, but I've got no real proof for this, so don't take me at my word. As soon as I get everything unlocked I'm figuring another week or so I'll update this review and let you know what's there. Multiplayer options are also very strong, offering up head to head play on one computer your choice of horizontal or vertical split screen and net play for up to six players.
Their statistics are accessible in the menu screens before the racing begins, and include such attributes as top speed, horsepower, torque, grip, etc. Unfortunately, unlike NFS3 , there's no comparison chart available, so when scanning through the many cars, it's often very hard to tell how one performs against another. The best way to evaluate their performances is, of course, on the race track.
I personally just like to grab the one with the best combination of acceleration and speed possible and use that, though. Why you'd want a car with poor handling I can't imagine -- maybe for the challenge, but since you can't limit the AI opponent's choice of car, it's not a lot of fun watching them speed off in their high-power, high-traction vehicles. I'd be more inclined to play with different vehicles if they actually felt like the real thing, but as I'll discuss later, this game really fails to achieve any degree of realism and is definitely for pure arcade fans only.
Tracks vary from circuits to one long race course split into stages or checkpoints. As is the trend with the Test Drive series, all of the tracks are based in real-life settings like city streets or country roads. Additionally, practically all of the tracks are set in cities that actually exist around the world, including San Francisco, Moscow, Edinburgh, Sidney. The roads, of course, aren't modeled after the real geographical templates of the cities, but each of the tracks are vastly different visually; backdrops, roadside buildings and objects will all be recognizable as indigenous to that area.
The variety in the tracks is fair. One important thing to note is that several of the tracks from Test Drive 4 have been ported over to this sequel, so owners of that game may not feel there's enough new on offer.
New to this fifth edition is the "branching technology" that enables the player to actually approach forks in the road and choose a slightly different route -- the branches rarely last very long, however, and only in one or two tracks do they actually provide a different enough race course to be noticeable. And as has plagued this series for a while, there are a good number of "invisible barriers" which prevent you exploring side streets or other openings -- this can be extremely frustrating in some instances where the actual race course appears to lead you to follow a road that doesn't really exist for the game engine.
Some of the tracks definitely stand out as more fun than others. One of the bonus tracks, "The House of Bez", takes on the theme of Micro Machines and has you racing amongst giant household objects, like playing cards and video cassettes, across the carpet. The San Francisco track is also one of my favorites as it features one of the city's most famous characteristics -- the unfeasible steep hills. Launching yourself off those at mph is always good for a laugh.
Graphically, there hasn't been a great advance since Test Drive 4 it appears, but the visuals are still well above average. They definitely tend to look better when moving and the sense of speed in the game is certainly well accomplished since much of the visuals have a rather indistinct blurry look up close. Variety is once again the game's best feature in the graphics department as each track has countless amounts of different scenery, more so than most other racing titles.
Special effects are definitely less impressive and more scarce than other racers. The only weather I encountered was rain, and the 'drops hitting against the camera lens' effect that was implemented exceedingly well in NFS3 and Ultim te Race Pro is very lackluster here. The cars look pretty good, and things like overcast shadows affect their appearance, but again not to the quality of the reflective chrome in NFS3. The backdrops can be very beautiful, especially the North Carolina course where at one point, you're driving past a vast lake which reflects the sky.
Audio is somewhat lacking. Impact and crash noises are both weak and unrealistic, and the environmental sounds aren't up to the quality of NFS3. For example, when entering tunnels, all that happens in TD5 is your engine noise becomes louder instantly - NFS3 did a lot more to make it sound like you really were travelling through a tunnel, especially if a police car's siren was wailing behind you.
The sound effects of crashes aren't the only disappointing elements. The actual reaction from all the cars involved in collisions is pitiful and certainly won't encourage you to believe that you're racing down streets in excess of mph. I don't expect the incredible physics engine of Carmageddon 2 come to think of it, why don't most racing games play as well as C2? It's obvious that the controls have been ported directly from the console version or at least manufactured with consoles in mind.
The support for analogue controllers doesn't appear to be well implemented - at least the joystick I tried it with managed to do little but spin out of control at the weakest nudge. I had better luck using a digital control like the keyboard, but that means swerving slightly to the left or right is accomplished with taps of the keys or gamepads -- something I thought had been left behind to the racers of old.
There are a few more controls available including look-behind no rear view mirrors though and a handbrake which is good for sliding at high speed around tight corners. Camera view adjustments can be made -- between chase and front bumper. There's about eight different settings for the chase camera which are barely a few centimeters apart so it seems rather superfluous. There's also no cockpit mode which is a shame. One of my biggest complaints about the tracks is how non-interactive they are -- you're barricaded in tight between the edges of your designated route, so you can't skid off into the 'rough', for example, or knock down any signs, cones etc there's no 3D objects, period.
You don't see any U-turns, like in NFS3 where you can cut across the grass if you felt daring. This also contributes to another problem with the tracks often having the "feel" of a contrived race track rather than real-life streets. Many of the NFS courses throughout the series had a much more life-like feel about them.
I'm also not too excited about the way the game limits your speed when riding off of what is considered the "optimum" area of the road, for example, sidewalks are a no-no area -- there is no physical reason why your speed should be unable to go above 70mph when on the sidewalks a moral reason, sure, but not physical , yet this game prevents it. This is another throwback to the racing games of yesteryear where it would swap realism for gameplay elements like punishing players for not staying on the road.
Fortunately, a split-screen mode has been implemented TD4 lacked this, I believe so jumping in for some instant relief with a friend is possible and works quite well in fact. You can also toggle civilian traffic on and off, which is good, because I've always found dodging between the slow-moving cars one of the great thrills of these types of racing titles. When you finish a single race in first position, the ability to race it in reverse is enabled which will help longevity further.
There's also the option to include cop cars in your races. There's no scanner, you'll only ever be chased by one cop car, they don't coordinate or converse with fellow officers on the force and they don't setup roadblocks or spike strips.
They appear to be more of a tacked-on feature than anything. When a cop sees you it's hard to test if he just spots you automatically, or if he clocks your speed, since without a scanner, you get little warning that you're approaching a cruiser , he puts on the sirens and comes a-chasin' he doesn't go after AI players either, unlike NFS3.
All he has to do is get in front of you -- not run you off the road -- and you spontaneously brake to a halt as if he has some powerful grip on your mind as soon as his car is visible in your front windshield. The instant that you stop, the mindlock is released and you race on. Kind of dopey, really. Racing as the police is a bit of fun, and is quite nostalgic of the classic coin-op Chase HQ. As soon as you come across a speeder, you hit your "horn" key to activate the sirens though maintaining the siren is not necessary for the game's purposes, it obviously helps the atmosphere - so to do this, I have no idea why you have to keep the key depressed , and the offending car displays an energy bar.
Every time you ram it, the energy goes down. It won't hold your attention for long, but can help release some aggression. There's no option to play this mode with two or more players, though.
Modem Internet play is also a no-no, but I'm not surprised. Barring Motorhead , I've yet to see a racer that any company has bothered to make playable for the Internet gaming community. It might be beneficial for all if this review was spared a rant on that subject. The arcade racing genre is overcrowded these days, and Test Drive 5 sadly doesn't compete too well with the current pack.
Although visually it makes a competent stand the 3D accelerated version, that is , it's still not the best out there, and its lack of decent controls and handling, restricted level of interaction on race tracks and abysmal crashes involving the car collisions, that is; not a programming bug! If you want to add in a new slant, pick up Carmageddon 2 for some awesome driving physics, but be prepared for some gore.
