Sultanyegah

I've been playing car games since Accolade's Test Drive in the 80s and I've played hundreds of games for thousands of hours. This game is a good arcade racer, good physics, good tracks, cars and all the rest. People give it low ratings just because it's not a spiritual successor to PC2. I am giving it a 10 to correct the injustice. This game is a solid 7-8 on normal standards.

NFS Epilepsy 2.0 I am writing this in intensive care unit after being exposed to so many flashing colors and I am convinced this game is the real deal for reducing world population! Really really bad game design. I spend 2 hours trying to collect items, win races and when I finish the map, I already have 4 stars. Good, I escape the day and start the night.. With 4 stars! Great! So I struggle 3x more time to lose cops to be able to enter the race, struggle more during the race, struggle more and more after the race to lose them again and get to the other race spot, playing PAC-MAN through the streets. After 3 hours of night, I gather everything, bank 20k and guess what, all of a sudden 5 cops appear, I get stuck, lose all money, go jail. Ok ok.. Everything ook. But why do they take all my money? I played the game for 3 day/3 nights, took 10 hours, I ended up making 100k, but 60k of that got confiscated by cops. The game is unforgiving and this is coming from someone who has thousands of gametime with car games, starting from Test Drive 1 at 1986... Not hard, unforgiving. You can drive perfectly for 5 minutes and in a corner your car just decides to lose control, then you can go out of road, miss narrow checkpoints, crash oncoming traffic, etc etc. and find yourself ending race last; losing 3k, without a chance to restart. Imagine having 10k cash, playing for 4 hours and having 8k now, because you pay to enter races, and you win, but then lose all the money to an endless stream of cops... Boooo

The depth of the game, including the newspapers, random e-mails, random chatter all around the zones... And the atmosphere, characters, plot, skill system, multiple approaches to problems and so on make this game a pinnacle in its own time. The fact that the graphics have aged doesn't make this game any less good because you can use mods that improve textures and still enjoy it.

22 years and still one of the best turn based strategy games out there. There were a lot of contenders but no other game ever came close to this.

A "would be" arcade game that has gone all the way into "pay to win" scheme. They add new content, which is locked behind store, they add new cars, which are locked behind store. You got Deluxe edition? You got season pass and all? Well, pay us more, because we painted these cars in black&white now. No thanks. Forza Horizon is much less greedy.

I've played racing games since Test Drive and Grand Prix (by Accolade) in 1986. I've played most of anything that went out. NFS, Gran Turismo, Forza and so on. Test Drive Unlimited was a superb game and it kept me coming back more than the others. The atmosphere, the driving, the scenery, the design... I just finished it from scratch again and I am happy I did. It brought back nice memories. (Just remember using a 60 FPS limiter if you try to play the game today, because otherwise you'll have invisible police cars and erratic AI behavior due to the 300 FPS your game will get with newer Graphics Cards).

First things first, game base is great. Combat mechanics and hangar (the feel of the mechs/scale) is nice, graphics are decent, BUT everything else is broken. 1. Enemy spawns are very bad.. A dropship can unload 3 assault mechs right on top of you, or they can suddenly spawn 300 yards ahead of you on open terrain where you can see miles ahead and start to tear you down. Demolition missions can spawn endless mechs (based on both time and destruction percentage). So if you destroy the base fast, you get overwhelmed fast. If you go slow, you get overwhelmed by mechs yet again. 2. AI is totally stupid. They don't obey your orders and are very eager to hit you or each other. They act like friendly mechs don't count as obstacles. They also act like friendly buildings don't exist. 3. Most necessary AI commands are missing (like "hold position" or "stay ranged"). 4. Hardpoints are very few and fixed, mech customization is very low. No engine / chasis / armor adjustments. 5. There's no "heat efficiency" gauge on mech customization screen. You won't know how a mech's heat efficiency is until you take the mech out and test it (which you need to do a few times to get the right setup, but the load times are very long). 6. There's no real radar, you need to have visual contact with enemy to see them on radar, yet even when you have visual contact, if the target moves further than 825m (depending on weather I think), your target gets cleared. They can shoot you, but you can't target them. 7. There're weapons with 1700m range, but your target reticule shows only +1250 8. LRM locks are lost when your target gets cleared (target moves behind a building, target moves far and target is lost, you change your target, your mech shuts down due to heat). When this happens, previously locked missiles just bombard the ground. I think this even includes missiles sent by your team. 9. Randomly generated terrains are sometimes pain to play. 10. Universe is too big, with a lot of randomly generated missions, but feels like devoid of spirit, empty in the inside, built for just grind. 11. Negotiation Bonus maximum limits are random, which makes some missions totally unprofitable. Worst part is, they can even randomly change between missions during multi-missions, totally killing your bonuses. 12. Taking a clean mech out of cold storage and installing weapons takes 3 months! 13. There's no game difficulty. Sometimes, randomly generated missions are so overwhelming that you don't stand a chance. 14. Repair time and costs are very high in conflict zones, which forces you to travel safe planets to repair and travel back, which takes a lot of game time. 15. There's no "ironman" mode. 16. You can't sell mechs from cold storage, so you basically can carry 11 mechs. But there are multi-missions and different tonnage requirements, which a 11 mech hangar can't provide very well. All in all, this game would be perfect if it could be combined with BATTLETECH, but in current state it's more of a pain than enjoyment to play. It's like trying to play your much loved ball game with a broken leg.

This game is a JEWEL, a base for so many more great adventures to come. Game system is real good, design, quests, solutions, RPG features and so on. Characters, character interactions.. BUT.. 1. Story and side quests are short. Could be double the length. 2. Gameplay is very easy, even in hard difficulties. 3. Everywhere in the game is filled with same useless loot (millions of bullets and food and so on all around) 4. Very few rare/gold/epic/whatever usable items (except 3 science weapons, which are useless). All the rest are standardized... Game designers need to realize the killing effect of this "standardizing" in recent games.. Chaos is what makes the world flow, not order. You need to implement chaotic features into the game, to allow for great and unexpected experiences. Some very hard bosses, some unbalanced weapons and so on. Fallout 2 wasn't so much fun because everything was standard. Life doesn't work that way. Standardizing is totally boring and removes all fun. Please go ask Blizzard and learn from their mistakes. Ask them why people reverted to totally unbalanced and chaotic Vanilla.. Was it because it was nostalgia, or because the experience felt better. Still giving the game a 10, because it deserves a flat 8-9, which some people won't be giving due to other reasons.