Test Drive II: The Duel

Test Drive II: The Duel built the whole game on a simple, tempting idea: two supercars, an open road, and a duel over who reaches the finish first. You don't race on circuits but on public roads running through mountains, deserts, and along the coast, where the player faces not only the rival's car but also oncoming traffic and police patrols. The route is divided into stages, between which you refuel, so the game feels more like an illegal street race than a sporting contest.

The driving model retains the series' typical trait, namely an emphasis on manual gear shifting and on making the player feel the difference between individual machines. An over-revved engine, a badly chosen gear, or braking too late before a bend usually ends the same way, that is, scraping against a rock face or falling off a cliff. The cockpit view with the specific car's dashboard was highly effective for its time, and the game paired it with colorful VGA graphics, a rich engine soundscape, and a suitably brisk pace. An interesting feature was support for add-on disks with more cars and more landscapes, which let players expand the game's content.

At the time Test Drive II was very popular precisely because it offered a fantasy most players couldn't experience otherwise: getting behind the wheel of a dream sports car and pushing it along mountain switchbacks to the limit of its abilities. Its influence can be seen throughout the later wave of road racing games with licensed cars and police in pursuit. Today the game shows its age; collisions are unforgiving, the roads repeat, and the opponent's artificial intelligence is very straightforward, but as a historical record of where racing games were heading at the start of the nineties it deserves attention. What's also interesting is how well its basic idea still works. A duel between two cars on a narrow road with no other rivals carries clear tension and forces the player to take risks exactly where they should rather slow down. That very principle keeps returning in racing games to this day.