Recent reviews by Funny Addiction

Second Edit: 20 hours in, I think it's time to make a fair review of the game. First of I'm going to say that I will still play the game despite there being more cons than pros, simply to see what the game has to offer until you complete the "Story".

Pros:

Audio.
The sound is the best thing about this game. It's outstanding and revving your engine is different in every single car, which brings me to the next point.

Physics.
Every car feels different to drive and there's a remarkable difference in the physics when you tune your cars. The cars are also much more likely to slide when it's wet and raining.

Graphic.
The game is pretty and the cars look quite good. The biom is not that different when you compare it to other racing games in the same genre (Forza Horizon, The Crew etc)

Time consumption.
I actually like the fact that you can't get the best cars from day one (maybe some people can) but you have to grind it out to purchase the cars you want. They don't hang on the trees.

Cons:

Multiplayer.
The world feels dead. I have twice, in 20 hours raced against another person and a few times seen people drive around in the world. This is a shame since the game is online-only and the devs have cut several great features from their older games (being able to purchase houses to increase your garage size because "it felt like a single-player experience").

Clans.
There's two. You can't create your own. Again, a huge missed opportunity. Imagine being able to drive for your clan, earning your clan points so you can upgrade your clan to maybe unlock cheaper car parts, cars, higher earnings in races etc. But you get nothing of the before mentioned. You can drive against 4 or 5 clan members (NPC's) and that's it.

Car styling.
It's very limited. The biggest deal breaker to many will probably be to many, that you can't change the hood, roof, spoiler, skirts, lights or anything else to make your car stand out. I don't know if it's a license issue or what not, but other big games can do it, so it's a huge let down and a big missed opportunity to not have it in the game. The only thing you can do is to change the livery of your car. This works quite all right though.

AI.
You can't change the difficulty of the AI. It adjusts after your driving skill which would be a great feature if it worked properbly. My AI opponents is at expert and they are either very fast (depending on the car) or quite slow which brings me to the next point.

Car balancing.
It would be nice if you could actually drive your favourite car within the game and still be competetive but guess what? You can't. There's a must buy car in every race category if you want to be competitive. You can't fine tune your car either, there's some presets you can pick from but who knows, it might just be a skill issue you could say - until you look at the global leaderboards - which are all dominated but a single car in every category.

Misc.
Game still "crashes" when you shut it down. You get an error message and is asked to submit the report.

Traffic.
Randomly spawns and despawns. Again, seems to be coded quite bad. I haven't counted but my guess is theres 15, maybe 20 different cars in the traffic. It gets VERY repetitive very fast.

Will edit again some time in the near future.




Edit: It's nice to see that the devs are involved with the community and are giving the players a compensation (my guess will be in-game credits) but it's now day 5 and I'm not able to finish a single race without getting a connection error.




3 days in and the connection to their service is still garbage.
So glad I bought the gold edition so I could play earlier...

The game should be called Test Drive Unlimited Server Clown instead.

Will change my review if they fix the server issues before the official lauch and theres some kind of compensation to those of us who bought it early.

Most of the negative reviews seems to be around the stuttering issue at launch.

The dev team fixed this issue WITHIN a day! It's not stuttering anymore for me at least.

With that out of the way I have to mention it's been a while since I've played a story driven game and to be honest the story isn't very compelling and quite vague. It's pretty much a prison escape game with very linear paths to follow and honestly I'd have loved some more cut scenes.

I like the limited amount of stuff you can carry. It makes you choose which items to hold onto and which items to drop. You can also upgrade weapons at "safe spots" - here I'd have liked to have seen more possible upgrades but it's not a major issue.
The combat isn't amazing but I think it's fine and even though I'm an adult this game has already given me quite a few jump scares.

I'd definately suggest this game to fellow gamers who likes horror games and a tiny bit of puzzle solving.

I'm guessing I'm around 1/3 or 1/2 through the game and so far I'd give this game a solid 7.5 out of 10

I will only recommend this game to people who have waited a while for a new rally game.

Cons:
- Physics. This games physics is absolutely terrible. I have managed to do a 7x barrol roll and I only had to repair my cars chassis.. For 2.52 minutes. Puncturing a tire and losing the rubber isn't that big of a deal either apparently as it was possible for me to still finish first on the stage with approx. 5 km left with a 89 % difficulty.
The repair part in general is unnessesary. I have not once had to spend more than 18 minutes on repairing my car. It would be a nice feature if you had to make decisions on which parts you should repair and which you shouldn't.

- Interface. The interface is kind of messed up as well. You have to leave career mode and go all the way out to the main menu in order to buy cars for your career. It feels like the interface could be streamlined a lot with some few tweeks here and there.

- Gameplay. There's quite a few weird details in the gameplay. If you are racing in Wales you may see a flock of rabbits running out in front of you car where in Sweden it may be crows flying out in front of your car. Also. The drones on the track is kind of wtf to me.
Another thing that annoys me is the rain/snow on your windscreen. It looks absolutely terrible.
After each stage you also have to waste around 7 seconds driving to a racing marshall to stop the car and you can't really control your speed anyways as you are slowed down if you cross the finish line too fast.

- Track layout. I noticed this when I was racing in Sweden. It feels like the tracks are quite similar. It feels as if the same track parts are used. Kind of like trackmania if you have ever tried to make a track in that game. This part is especially noticable in the hair pin corners.

Pros:
- Audio. The engine sound is amazing and so is the sound of your tires racing across the gravel and especially the snow.
I'm a really big fan of the soundtracks in the game as well although some of the songs have been used before. I'm looking at you Fifa.

- Handling. It's a very easy game to pick up and mistakes are very forgiving. This can both be a pro and a con but for the average Joe I think this is a pro.

Conclusion:
I don't feel like I have paid for a game that costs 54.99€. It would be a good game for half its price but it's too lackluster to be a AAA title in my opinion.

Awesome game. Still has some minor bugs but it can definately make you spend a lot of hours on it