It’s never been clear to me why so many 3rd party gaming developers decide to make off road racing games considering the vast amount there always seem to be on just about every gaming console known to man, yet apart for a few exceptions, always seem to suffer from anonymity. Perhaps I’m pigeonholing the genre here, but these types of games are usually played either by enthusiasts of off-road racing, or people that pick it up second hand for a laugh because it’s going. It’s kinda the alternative to Rally games for developers that are perhaps less confident to program such games in fear of loosing out the a more enthusiastic following of rally – not to mention the lack of money involved when it comes to licensing the cars that help to sell a rally game such as ‘Collin McRea Rally’ or even ‘Sega Rally’.

Not wishing to bash Angel Studio’s efforts at deciding to bring off-road gaming to the Xbox, because as gaming for a laugh, or taking seriously is concerned, is actually quite fun. Okay, so the intro to the game is actually pretty lame, but in this case, it’s important to disregard this before immediately thinking “this is gonna be shite” and returning it, because there’s actually something decent underneath a slightly poor presentation.

Moving onto the actual game itself (rather than rambling on about lots of useless nonsense of boredom), ‘Test Drive Off-Road (Wide Open)’ may be a bit of a large name, but it needs to be considering the sheer size of the game. You have three initial areas to drive / race around based in Moab, Yosemite and Hawaii (There are also some ‘unlock able areas’ too) and many modes of play to choose from. There’s standard ‘Single Race’ where you quite simply run round the many circuits in the three huge areas and unlock more circuits by getting in first place and beating your time score; ‘Career Race’ allows you to earn money out of winning races, which as with a lot of racing games enables you to upgrade and buy new cars (or should I say trucks?) and added features; ‘Stadium Race’ is a more tarted-up up version in front of a live audience (obviously) – while this feature is somewhat more bland than the rest of the game, it’s a great alternative when you’re too drunk to play the full thing in a bid to avoid throwing up over your control pad; and finally there is free roam where you can freely drive around the absolutely massive landscapes at your own leisure allowing you to become more familiar with your racing grounds.

Gameplay:
While as it may be easy to be somewhat put off by the immediate presentation of the game, ‘Test Drive’ really does actually need playing before any judgement can be passed off. One thing I’ve always liked about off-road games is their ‘pick-up-and-play’ interface. It all really depends on how you choose your vehicles. Like with any racing game, to know your truck is to know the back of your hand, if you just choose any random mode of transport you could find yourself in a rut, especially when playing in Multiplayer or Career Modes. I found the Chevy Silverado best for my needs, probably because I’m crap at handing cars on racing games – but that’s also what makes the gameplay on this game so good. The next trick is simply to know your landscapes and to try and memorise where the checkpoints are – and the game doesn’t really get much more complex than that.

It’s actually a really fun game to play, even if you dislike off-road racing, but especially playable in multiplayer and a few pints!

Graphics:
I’m in two minds about the graphical representation of here; because the general presentation of the game and the in-game graphics are actually quite shabby, but likewise the areas to drive around are absolutely massive. There are so many areas which you can drive around that no matter how many different courses there are for each area, it’ll probably take ‘Free Roam’ mode for you to truly experience just how much there is. So while the textures don’t look much better (albeit a little smoother) than something you’d see on the PlayStation, the attention to landscape detail compensates for this. Perhaps the lack of quality was sacrificed for the need of quantity in order to allow the levels to run smoothly at such a size, but you can’t help that feel that this game would have benefited more if the effort were made to include a lot more texture detail – even if they split each area into twos or fours if necessary, the end result would have been a lot more pleasing. This is more of a shame than anything else, but still, something for them to consider in a sequel?

Sound:
On the intro to the game we’re greeted with Metallica’s ‘Fuel’, from their not-quite-so-good ‘Reload’ album, but more disappointing is the dreadful cutting skills used to make the song fit with the intro. Being a fan of metal, I was pleased to see Metallica (although it is only the one song, ‘Fuel’) and Fear Factory, but for the rest of the bands concerned, you can’t help but say “Who?” – perhaps they ran out of licensing money? “No matter” you say to yourself, “…I’ll just load one of my own tunes from my hard drive” – sadly, you can’t (or if you can, there must be a really sneaky hidden option for it I haven’t found yet), so we have to put up with the reasonable, but mediocre soundtrack.

The sound effects are good, although the menu options use a lot of cliché sounds, and pretty much what you’d expect from this type of game. Nothing new to really add though, but not that you would be expecting anything else?

Longevity:
It’ll last you long enough, but it really comes down to how seriously you take off-road games. If you just enjoy playing them for a laugh then it’s probably one you’ll play now and again when you feel like a bash on something reasonably mindless and when the CPU is beating you on ‘Dead or Alive 3’. If you take it more seriously however then you’ll find that each of the options, the vast array of circuits to complete, all the cars and custom models to upgrade and all of this in all the difficulty settings, enough to keep you going for quite a while, not to mention the four-player multiplayer option is one that’ll occupy many bored hours with your mates.

Round Up:
It’s almost a shame in many respects. ‘Test Drive Off-Road’ has so much potential to be a really great game; while the gameplay and the options are there, this already is a good play, but sadly having hundreds of courses, cars and options will only allow you to play for a certain amount of time before the soundtrack starts to annoy you or simply just gets a little boring to look at. If you’re enthusiastic about off-road racing then this is definitely worth a look, but for the average gamer, you’ll probably enjoy this more if you do pick it off the second hand shelf; making this game, in turn fit along the archive of all other off road racing games. Either way, put into the appropriate decision, give this game a chance and you might be pleasantly surprised.