Test Drive Off-Road - Wide Open

The pitch was right there in the subtitle, and for once it wasn't marketing noise. Instead of a ribbon of dirt with invisible walls on either side, Angel Studios built four large territories and dropped checkpoints across them, leaving the route between each one up to the driver. Find a canyon shortcut, launch off a ridge, or take the slow sensible line through the valley floor. The terrain was the puzzle.

That design came from the same studio that had been experimenting with open city driving on Midnight Club, and the DNA shows. The trucks are heavy, bouncy things with suspension that visibly works, and the handling sits closer to arcade toy than simulation, which is the correct call for a game that expects you to drop forty feet onto a rock shelf and keep going. Momentum matters more than racing lines. Wreck the landing and you lose twenty seconds scrabbling back up a slope, which stings far more than a spin-out on a conventional circuit.

Where it strains is in what open terrain does to a race. Rivals following their own paths means you can go long stretches without seeing anyone, and the sense of a contest evaporates into a solitary orienteering run. The draw distance, generous for 2001, still leaves ridgelines materialising ahead of you, and pointing a truck at scenery that hasn't fully resolved is a recognisable early PS2 frustration. The licensed vehicle roster, all Jeeps and Hummers and pickups, was a selling point at the time and reads as period furniture now.

It is worth returning to for the thing almost nobody else attempted that year. Off-road racers were mostly tracks with mud textures; this one understood that the appeal of driving off-road is the absence of a road. Rally games would eventually get this freedom in controlled doses, and the truly open dirt sandbox wouldn't arrive properly until much later hardware could hold a whole landscape in memory without flickering.

Play it expecting an experiment rather than a polished product. The ambition outruns the frame rate and the AI, but the first time you crest a hill with no idea what's on the other side and commit anyway, the point of the whole thing lands.