Test Drive 4

The Good
This is a game with very few positive points, two of them really stand out from the pack: the soundtrack... featuring wicked and outstanding music which you can hear in your cd player, and the drag racing feature, innovative at its time, and fun, really fun and the times set by the cars are more or less accurate. Also, the cars featured are really cool but unbalanced, because that "old vs new" concept worked, in some aspects. The older cars have more power and overall speed, but the newer have better handling and acceleration.

The Bad
The AI is pretty bad, or good depending on what you expect from it, Once a rival surpasses you, there is a very small chance to see it again. It is pretty lame too that you can't almost never win with the lower-end cars, but the computer does it very frequently, for example in a XJ-220 vs Shelby Cobra duel, the first one is the car with the winning odds, until the cobra magically duplicates its horsepower (or whatsoever) leaving you behind really easy. Also, the graphic engine is really flawed, and the physics are too heavy and unresponsive, to properly finish one of the complex circuits you need to pick a slower car to handle the curves without crashing, but choosing such a car only guarantees you a defeat -you can´t even reach the checkpoints-. You can't adjust the difficulty either, because even if you do, you can't notice any difference.

The Bottom Line
I thought at first that I didn't achieve many victories in the game because I was only a bad player, but then I realised that everyone else complained about the game's extreme difficulty. And yes, it is a very difficult game, and together with the control they become lethal issues for any racing game. Its really impossible to unlock the hidden content because it's unlikely that anyone could win all the tracks. You could be leading a race for 3/4 of it, and with a minimum mistake you could lose easily 3 or 4 positions and never regain them again, especially in the circuits with many curves.

If you want fun with it, play only the drag racing mode, Apart from that is a very bad entry in the respected test drive series.

The Good
You can listen to the techno music on a stereo, since its CD audio. Nice graphics.

The Bad
Everything. The controls are bad. The AI is bad. Everything is bad!

-You can only drive on the tracks. But in the previous game, you could drive anywhere, including off-road.

-Theres no damage.

-The other cars are very hard to beat sometimes, and they are like they have a pre-written plan, instead of reacting to whats happening NOW.

-Your car is more like a hovercraft than a car, and does not feel at all like you're driving a car.

-When you are doing well, the other cars ram into you as if you don't exist and its harder to win then, as if it wasn't already hard to win.

-It makes you really mad when you get all the way to the finish line and a car rams you from behind since it does not know you exist and you lose the race.

The Bottom Line
It sucks, plain and simple. The previous game, Test Drive III is much better, althrough it runs way too fast and does not run properly even if slowed down on a fast PC. Maybe download the demo, to see how bad a racing game can be, or just to see the look at the graphics. Otherwise, don't go near it! The Need for Speed games are much better, but I have already mastered NFS3.

The Good
Accolade didn't develop this disaster, Pitbull Syndicate did, and now I'm actually wishing that Accolade developed it! This is a complete total disaster, okay, there are a few nice cars, and I am happy to see that the graphics are good, the graphics prevent this game from being a catastrophe. Really there's nothing else that this game offers that is short of dreadful!

The Bad
Oh, where should I start? I'll try to make this short, the game engine is not good, the graphics although somewhat good aren't smooth, the sound is so horrible I can't leave the speakers on, most of the cars (which are still not many) are slow & tough to handle, the controls are a disaster, practically everything about this game is like toxic gas...

The Bottom Line
DON'T, just simply don't make the dreadful mistake of buying this, or even wasting a few megabytes on your computer for the demo, there is no reason to play this game, absolutely no reason... Avoid this and lead a happy life!