Surprising great sandbox game that'll keep you occupied for quite some time.
First Impressions: Upon loading TDU you are presented with a short tutorial mission. It's simple enough, you are to rent a car for 30 or 60 minutes, and drive from A - B following the guidance of your lovely assistant, the in-car GPS. Upon completion of this short tutorial you are then able to being to get down-and-dirty with the real business of spending your initial in-game money on a car and home of your choice. The home is simple enough. The more expensive it is then the more slots you have in its' garage for storing cars. This appears to include starter homes with space for four cars up to luxurious mansions where you can keep up to ten cars. The choice of buying cars seems to be fairly extensive, especially for a handheld game. You being with three (I think) choices of manufacturers to pick a car from and this seems to extend as you progress in the game and discover new locations and new car dealerships.
The cars themselves can be extensively customised. When you buy your new car you get to choose the wheel-trims and paint-job. With your money you can also cruise on over to part-shops where you can further customise your vehicle very extensively.
The interface to check everything from you in-car radio to stats is simple, straight-forward and easy to use. There's plenty of style and gloss in this game but thankfully the menus' are easy to navigate intuitively.
Gameplay: If I had to pigeonhole what type of racing game this is, then I would describe it as sitting somewhere between PGR for the xbox and a Need for Speed game. Accelerating/Braking and general car handling are handled semi-realistically. The environments are non-destructible. If you smack head-on into a lamp-post then your car will more or less stop dead and the lamp-post lives to fight another day. I think this style of gameplay works fine in TDU.
The map is simply huge! A whole island to explore which I believe is realistically modelled on Hawaii although others will be better able to verify this than I. It includes urban and rural environments, and cruising on down to the beach is rather nice too. Like the need for speed series, you find races by driving the the location and hitting the triangle button to enter the race. Winning races gains you more money to buy better cars/car-parts/houses with, and they also provide you with "Master Points- MP". MPs are rather like gaining experience points in a role-playing game. As you gain them, they move you up in rank from beginner - novice -expert and so on. This will also help to unlock more races located around the island.
Offline gaming: Good fun, you need to be careful as reckless all-out aggressive driving will get you chased by the cops.
Online gaming: This is what pushes my buttons! Although the game box states (in UK version) as being multiplayer for only 1-4 players, this is not strictly always true as you can encounter any other online player who happens to be cruising around like yourself.
Actually "formally" racing other online players works very well. All you have to do is flash your headlights at them when they're very close to you and this will initiate a "challenge" to them for a race. The island map will then open up and you even get to decide the entire race-route and customise it. Very fun indeed. Finally, if you lose the race you can opt to try and get "revenge" on your nemesis, essentially a re-match.
Graphics: Overall they're good. Textures can seem a little muddy, slighly low-resolution but this is clearly because of the size of the environment and the sheer quantity of data needed to map the entire island. After all you can't have it both ways and I think they found a good balance in this regard.
Sounds: Plenty of music in your car-radio with the option to listen to your own mp3's instead if you so wish, so no problems here as far as I can see.
Value: I'm rather partial to sandbox games. I like how they give you the freedom to play the game your own way and do your own thing. Obviously this has certain limitations within a racing game, but I can tell already after having bought this game one day ago that it will keep my interest for a long time.
Final comments: there is so much more I could say about this game. It has a lot of depth for a racing game and for a handheld game I think this is truly exceptional. Believe you me, I don't call it "exceptional" lightly! I've been playing games since the early 1980's when I won an Atari2600 using cereal packet cut-out tokens.
I've not played the other versions of this game. I think it would average on a full console such as the xbox360 or PC but on a handheld it works superbly well. I think the gamespot review is, in my opinion, a little bit stingy because it appears to be being compared to its full-console bigger brothers. I think handheld games should be considered on their own merits as far as possible and so I'll rate this game highly (and as honestly as I can). Final word: I recommend it strongly to fans of racing games, non-racing game fans however will still find plenty here to enjoy and come back to time and again.