Test Drive Unlimited 2 is absolutely an awesome game.
Just played that today, and I have to say it's far from that. Well, "played" is something of an overstatement. "Tried to play" is more like it. I thought I'd use my spiffy force feedback wheel to play it, but nope. Even though there are settings for force feedback in the game and the wheel stops self-centering when the game is started (as it's supposed to in games that support it), there actually isn't any force feedback, so it's extremely hard to control with a completely loose wheel with no feel to it. Even the default self-centering would be preferable, but even if you turn the FF off in the options it won't kick in, the setting just does nothing. And don't think that's just my crummy wheel to blame, a quick look at the official forums revealed that it doesn't work with any wheels. Furthermore, the default sensitivity and deadzone settings are utter crap and make the car completely uncontrollable. You can adjust them, but the sliders are not labelled and on some of them the maximum setting is on the left instead of the usual right, so it takes a lot of trial and error just to figure out what they do. The sound stutters a lot and the scenery pops in in an especially hideous and noticable way.
All you need to know is that the official, boxed release's disk name is "review" and the launcher shows the game version as "TDU2 QA v055 build 1". Maybe after a dozen patches or so it'll be a decent game. Personally I gave up on it after two hours, 90% of which was spent trying to get the damn wheel to work.
What a fucking joke.
That said, TDU1 is quite excellent and well worth getting.
Edit: Slight revision, after calming down I have tried the game again with a 360 controller and it is a lot more playable (than both TDU2 with a wheel and TDU1 with a controller). So if you're after driving
simulators, look elsewhere. If you're after casual driving games, this one actually doesn't seem so bad. Plus it's just about the only driving game with a large, open world, exotic supercars, classic vintage cars, and off-roaders in one package.