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Cruising along ain roads in a '98 Dodge Viper or '69
Chevrolet Corvette remains a dream for most Americans. If you
share that dream, you'll want to check out Accolade's Test Drive
5, the fifth title in the long-standing driving series.
Included in the package are 14 modern exotic and 14 vintage
muscle cars for use on 18 tracks, accurately recreating some of
the world's most exciting driving locales. Some of the other
playable cars include the '98 Jaguar XKR, '71 Plymouth Barracuda,
'67 Pontiac GTO, '98 Aston Martin Advantage, and the '68 Ford
Mustang.
Various game styles round out Test Drive 5's decent racing
offering. Drivers can compete in a single race or test skills
across multiple leagues. Test Drive 5 also offers a new "cop
chase" mode where players assume the role of a officer and
attempt to pull over any speeding racers; there's also a
split-screen mode for head-to-head racing competition. Along with
extensive play modes, Test Drive 5 also includes plenty of candy
for the senses with realistic rain and snow effects, night
driving, and a pumping soundtrack featuring Fear Factory and
KMFDM. If you're dreaming of solid arcade-style racing action,
Test Drive 5 offers many less hours of enjoyment. --Doug
Radcliffe
Review
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In the world of computer games, a product lives or dies
according to how well it compares with similar products. This is,
of course, old news for any serious gamer. After all, you're not
going to fork over $40 for one game when you get a much better
one for the same a, right? Case in point: Test Drive 5 from
Accolade and Pitbull Syndicate. While the game is a decent arcade
racer with great graphics, plenty of cars, and a ton of tracks,
it simply falls short of its number one competitor - EA's Need
for Speed III - in almost every conceivable way.
One of the few areas in which Test Drive 5 can cl superiority
over Need for Speed III is in the sheer number of cars and tracks
available. Test Drive 5 offers a total of 28 cars, which, as in
Test Drive 4, represent an even mix of modern sports cars and
classic muscle cars. This number is a bit deceiving, however, as
seven of these cars are "locked" at the beginning of the game (a
"feature" I've always loathed in PC racing games) and are likely
to stay that way for a great many players due to Test Drive 5's
difficulty and physics oddities (more on that later).
Furthermore, four of these 28 cars are simply versions of
the game's basic Chevy Camaro, TVR Cerbera, Dodge Charger, and
Ford Mustang. On top of all this, several of the cars in Test
Drive 5 aren't all that much fun to drive. Cars like the Nissan
Skyline, Cerbera, and Aston Martin Vantage - though beautiful and
exotic in the real world - are decidedly plain and unexciting in
an arcade racer. Besides, it's virtually impossible to win a race
against the computer in any one of these cars, so why include
them at all?
Test Drive 5's graphics are certainly on par with Need for Speed
III, though Accolade's title does not handle distance rendering
quite as well. Some of the car models are a bit plain, but all in
all the game looks fantastic, with eye-popping reflections on
every car and an impressive attention to detail on each of the
tracks. I actually preferred the track design in Test Drive 5, in
fact, because each road course seemed to be more realistic than
those in Need for Speed III. Alternate routes can be found on
almost every track, so you don't have to follow the same old line
every time you race.
The game flew along on a Pentium II 300 with dual Voodoo cards,
even at a resolution of 1024x768, but oddly there's no real
sensation of speed. Whether you're driving 80 or 175 miles per
hour, the game looks and feels exactly the same. This is
incredibly disappointing, especially when you think you're going
fast and a computer-controlled cop sails past to give you a
ticket. The whole point of a game like this is to feel that rush
of driving a car you'll probably never own in situations you'll
probably never experience (or at least, that you'd be very
unlikely to survive).
Poor engine sound effects further reduce the game's sense of
immersion, as most cars sound exactly the same. The Shelby Cobra
- easily the best of the basic cars in Test Drive 5 - sounds
great, but every other car sounds pretty weak. To make matters
worse, the game's music (which is generally quite good) drowns
out the sound effects unless you turn it down to the lowest
setting.
In spite of its many other flaws, poor gameplay is where Test
Drive 5 drops from contender to also-ran status. Basic races are
extremely difficult, even on the lame-o difficulty setting with
arcade physics enabled. Computer-controlled cars always
out-accelerate you unless you're driving a Cobra. It is far too
easy to spin out of control, and you lose far too much ground to
the computer when you do so. Also, while AI cars can send you
spiraling off the course with the slightest brush (and always
seem to do so near the finish line when you're in first place),
you can hardly ever run your nents off the track. What this
means is that while you have to fight your way back into the race
after losing control, the same is almost never true of the
computer-controlled cars. So not only do they get the jump on you
at the start, they also rarely lose any ground over the course of
the race. Even worse, spinning out an AI car is the only way to
issue tickets in the game's cop-chase mode. And as long as we're
talking about cop chases, why on earth do you have to hold down
the button to keep your siren going? Simply put, Test Drive 5's
general gameplay - and the cop-chase mode in particular - can't
hold a candle to Need for Speed III.
Test Drive 5 does offer a drag racing mode that you won't find
in Need for Speed III, but this is little more than a ten-second
speed burst that loses its appeal after about three runs. Drive
the Cobra and you'll win most of the time anyway.
So while Test Drive 5 looks pretty good in a vacuum, it simply
does not compare well with Need for Speed III. As with the
previous version, the only real reason to choose this over EA's
arcade racer is to get behind the wheel of muscle cars like the
GTO and Hemi 'Cuda. Otherwise, Need for Speed III offers better
gameplay, cooler cars, and a much better pursuit mode (for all
you law types out there).--Michael E. Ryan
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review
