My TDU2 experience so far (Xbox 360 owner and fan of TDU1):
* Install the game, boot it up and hope to quickly get to the discovery part of the game, which to me is where TDU shines. Have to sit through a bunch of really trollishly bad cut-scenes and dialogue. Have to drive around a bit, buy a car (mustang), get a cheap house, and finish the first championship of six events. Six events before I can just free roam? OK, I guess. I just want to cruise around, but I'll see whats on offer.
* The mustang handles like shit, seemingly incapable of taking city street turns at even low speeds without spinning out. Switching between hardcore and assists doesn't make much of any difference. Every time I tackle a time trial or race I do OK until I have to make a 90 degree turn - then I always spin out. This is hard to compensate for because your view re-centers after every turn, so you tend to overcompensate and crash.
* Frustrated with having to finish the championship, I retry each event several times until I luck out and make it through in first place. Now new objectives pop up: Win the offroad championship, get a haircut, buy some clothes, get plastic surgery, pick this NPC up. My phone won't shut the hell up and my GPS is always assigned to these objectives.
* I use my cash to buy an off-road car, going for the Hummer. Thing handles like a tank but seems less prone to spin out. After a day or two I attempt the off-road championship. This is when I notice the 1.5 - 2 second delay on my car when starting a race, which just lets me watch the first three cars get ahead of me. Now in most of the races, with some casual practice I can eventually catch up and overtake these guys, but the Time Trials are exercises in pure frustration. They're difficult enough, but with a 2 second penalty right from the get-go they become maddening. But I persevere a bit, and manage to come in second place in a few events and first place in others. Now I'm tied with my rival with one event left - which turns out to be a time trial from hell itself. A maddening array of off-road switchbacks and elevation changes. I give it a solid 6 or 7 goes, but always come up a minimum of 3.5 seconds behind the 1st place time. Frustrated and demoralized I quit out of the championship.
* I have 70K in cash, 3 cars (mustang, hummer, and the rival mustang from the first championship.) From the official forums I see players shitting on both the mustang and hummer for these events so I want to get a "real" car - a competitive one. But I can't, because I'm all out of garage space. So I need to buy a house first, which will cost me another 80K. So, I seek out the world events...
* I do about a dozen "drive me carefully to X" missions, good for only 2K each. Do a few of the "drop me off at my meeting - go faster!" missions, which net me 3K. I attempt to do a "follow my girlfriend" mission, but once we hit the straightaways the girlfriend's car leaves my Hummer in the dust. I retry a few times before I realize I don't have the power to keep a close enough tail on her and quit out.
* Add to all of this the two evenings spent almost exclusively mussing with my controller settings to try to come to grips with the new handling model, and the loud static and white noise coming through my speakers from random player mics, and I'm now so out of love with this game I doubt I'll ever boot it up - unless there is some gigantic miracle patch that not only fixes the problems but somehow injects the "fun" back into the game.
Now, just as background - I am not new to racing games, and I regularly play Burnout Paradise, NFS: Hot Pursuit, Test Drive Unlimited 1, Gran Turismo 5, Forza 3 and NFS: Shift. Hell I'm even pretty decent at racing in GTA4 and Just Cause 2 for chrissakes. This is the ONLY racing game in my collection with such an annoying and unpredictable handling model, and the only one where I actively dread having to tackle turns at speed.
What the hell happened with this game? At the very least its not made for me, and this is surprising since I fell in love with everything TDU1 had to offer.
