TDU2 is a deeply flawed game with a handful of redeeming qualities.
The graphics are actually pretty poor and inexcusable for a game released in 2011. Even on the highest settings, it's barely above Grant Theft Auto quality. I kept thinking there was some hidden setting I had to enable to make the glossy supercars shimmer and the shadows appear. Frame rate dips during most races, especially if you're in a city. Your best bet is just to turn things down as low as you can go in an effort to maintain a decent frame rate. You won't be missing much, trust me.
The "plot" and voice acting is laughable. Graphic wise, all of the characters look like the various Sims knock offs that appeared in 2005, and dressing them up in the various clothes just shows how poor the character models animate. You'll want to avoid any serious consideration of any voice acting – it's horrific, well below anything you think the gaming genre has passed now that it's 2011. Every cutscene reminds me of a Playstation 1 game, when they were first figuring out that they could make animated characters talk and just hired any old actor to voice the lifeless characters that make up the minimal plot. It's truly embarrassing and I found myself laughing out loud whenever my mostly mute character blurted out an abrupt "OKAY" or "YES SURE LETS DO IT". On the PC version, the characters continue to animate well beyond any time they should have completed delivering their lines, making me think there's some sort of optimization problem because the audio obviously runs faster than the animation.
What the game does have going for it is it's pure size. It reminded me of Burnout Paradise – there is a huge chunk of land of explore, and you are rewarded with various car dealerships, body shops, haircut locations, and things of that nature depending on how much you explore. It is a fun game because the huge world keeps you coming back to see more. Shame the graphics look so bad that you're basically seeing the same flat looking farmland and cities over and over again.
The game has License Tests which are supremely aggravating. Not because of their difficulty – basically, go offroad or hit an obstacle and you're done (and get to watch an unskippable cutscene while you restart, whee) – but because it forces you into a particular difficulty level and with a particular car. If you're used to driving on the "simulation" difficulty level, License Tests bring you back down to an easier level, which often makes it actually harder to complete because you have to temporarily drive a different way.
Annoyingly, the game is not optimized for the PC. It defaults to a very low sound volume, requiring you to alt-tab back to the volume control panel to adjust the sound via the Mixer. I couldn't adjust the zoom levels in the map without using the mouse wheel, even though it says to use the triggers on my Xbox 360 Windows controller. Plus, it screws with your mouse speed, forcing you to fix it once you quit the game and exit back to Windows. Very sloppy.
The events that you find while exploring are the usual point to point races, circuit races, things of that nature. The game is critical when you go off the road or cut corners. Many events require you to head from point A to point B without damaging your car or going offroad even a tiny bit – fortunately those usually don't have a time limit, so you're free to drive at whatever speed you fee is comfortable.
The level up system is obtuse and menu options for planning routes and finding things to do are difficult to decipher. You're constantly barraged by information from your cell phone, multiplayer achievements, current challenges, new goals, things of that nature – again reminds me of a very unpolished Burnout Paradise.
Multiplayer is a mixed bag. You're usually in an "always online with other people" multiplayer world, similar again to Burnout Paradise, however, depending on the server status and amount of people in your particular "world instance", you may be barraged with race requests from newbies with starter cars, or completely alone for miles and miles. When someone challenges you to a race, you rarely have any opportunity to determine what car or level they are, so you can find yourself quickly outmatched in an inferior car, with no way to know ahead of time unless you drive right up to them and guess their car's make and performance.
All in all this game was a disappointing purchase. It's fun for what it is – basically an open world driving game with licensed cars, arcade physics, and lots of goals in huge landscape. It's too shallow to appeal to hardcore racing fans and too obtuse to appeal to arcade racing fans.