Test Drive Unlimited 2

All the best games about cars are a little bit different: Burnout is both highly evolved and utterly, utterly depraved, while Ridge Racer is a light-streaked lucid dream where you ghost around corners and send out surprisingly gentle showers of sparks, and Forza Motorsport aims for sheer breadth of simulation options. Gran Turismo? Gran Turismo is part museum and part trip to the dentist: a clinical environment where softly-spoken experts have gathered to venerate and protect anything that comes with a camshaft.

So where does Test Drive fit in? Good question, and it's one that Unlimited 2 seeks to answer in some pretty interesting ways. The first Unlimited was a bit like an MMO and a bit like a summer holiday: a plush ramble (that's possible, right?) around an upmarket Hawaiian island where you took on challenges, launched impromptu rivalries with other players and saved up for weird new motors.

The sequel sticks to the same basic framework but elaborates on the options and player freedom. It also dials up the opulence to the point where the whole thing approaches soap opera levels. Not the grim British soaps which are all about getting your burger van impounded while someone stubs cigarettes out on your arm, mind, but one of those weird, upbeat foreign ones, obsessed with beautiful rich people hanging out on yachts and gesturing with half-filled whisky tumblers as they stand in front of picture windows. The nutty, aspirational ones.

At times, in fact, you may wonder how far the Eden Studios team plans on pushing the concept of simulation. TDU2 takes such delight in the luxurious world it's piecing together that it's happy to let you get out from behind the wheel and leave the car in the garage for long stretches of time should you wish to do so. It's fine - the garages look like mansions anyway, so your cars won't be lonely, and there's plenty of stuff for you to do on two feet as you buy houses, move your furniture about and fiddle with your avatar.

While you may not have signed up to a racing game so you could wrestle with corner sofas and flat-screen tellies, you can't fault the options available. You can tweak every aspect of your avatar's appearance, buy a range of increasingly over-the-top homes, add pictures and manage the stats of your MyLife profile, and invite your online friends over to hang out in your imaginary living room. It's a fascinating prospect, even if many people will stick to simply customising the cars (a wide range of decals and paint-jobs are available), and TDU2's social focus means you won't be mistaking it for any other driving game on the market.

There's a hint of Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball to proceedings occasionally - not in terms of creepy access to some unlikely ladies, but in the way that an aspirational lifestyle has been warped into a charming kind of parody. TDU2 really wants you to explore the world of the rich car enthusiast, and it's a strategy that percolates right down to the point of purchase. Eden doesn't want you buying cars or messing with their engines inside boring menu trees - it wants you to be able to walk into actual showrooms and garages and enjoy the browsing experience in three dimensions.

A lot of this could come off like Home - come to think of it, quite a lot of it could come off like Animal Crossing - but the car culture setting ensures that it feels like a good fit with the rest of the game. Besides, all of the social aspects are tied into the new progression system, where you can move through the narrative not just by racing but also by doing other things like building up your own status.

Avatars come in handy in the seamlessly integrated online options, as you form racing clubs with other players, deck out your clubhouse - okay, I've made it sound like a tree fort, whereas the one I was shown had parquet flooring and up-lighters - and hang around inside it with friends. More importantly, your club can polish its double-dangerous driving skills and take on rival clubs in eight-player races and other challenges.