If you are a fan of racing games, even in the slightest, it is essential that you get this game (or atleast rent it).
Graphically, the game looks pretty darn good. When being played on a HDTV, it looks fantastic. But on a SDTV, it simply looks alright (not the games fault). The surrounding area in particular looks very good, the details stand out well. One of my biggest complaints about the graphics happens to be the draw distance. You can't see very far in the distance at all. The game also suffers from a pop-up problem. When you reach high speeds, you will consistently find trees, buildings, and traffic suddenly popping into your view, which makes it kind of difficult to make it through heavy traffic at high speeds.
Game play wise, the game is really fun. Although the career mode basically has no story at all, it is fun regardless. You start out in the airport and you simply choose one of several fairly bland looking characters, and you fly to Hawaii… You then rent a car, then go buy a house and car. It's a simple concept, and eventually you will most likely find yourself bored. The races are sometimes very slow paced, and it takes forever until you can actually use the high end cars and motorcycles in races… I actually stopped playing on my first run through, because I didn't want to drive slow cars again after I got the high end cars…. It was just too boring.
One of the best parts about this game is the online multiplayer (when it actually works). One of the selling points about this game is the fact that it is massively multiplayer. When the first game came out, there were tons of people racing around the island. You can engage in "duels", which allows you to create a custom race track, then race around that course. You can even bet money on the outcome of the race. You can also do online multiplayer races, which, when completed, give you credits to use in career mode. Multiplayer sounds great on paper, however many times that I have been playing the game, the TDU servers are offline. If a game like WoW had its servers down this consistently, not many people would play it.
Nowadays, when the servers are working, there aren't too many people playing it at any given time. The game is great fun, but eventually you have simply done everything there is to do, and you don't want to do it again. If you are a fan of racing games at all, I highly suggest you either pick up a copy of this game from your local store, or rent a copy.