Personally, I'm used to in-car from PGR3, but I find myself switching between that and 3rd person depending on the car / race. Bikes I must race in 3rd, cars it depends on the course (like uphills I just cant pull it off).

Overall, I'm having a blast just driving around with friends. Some things have been irritating, like server related, but I don't think Atari believed this game would be as popular has it has become. I hear they are working on upgrading their servers, which should help.

Oddly enough, it's the same feeling I got playing the last two Driver games, both of which were also by Atari. It's as though your mind just enters a void of bad sound and mediocre visuals, and you just get stuck there. Suddenly, you snap back to reality and realize you just spent hours doing nothing.

However the muscle car sounds were an insult to the v8 engine:)

I would only recommend this game to someone who loves driving.

However Matt I agree its weak in many areas, I was realy dissapointed with the "Car customization" features. What's the point of selling a car on a market place when anyone could easily get the same car.

If this game had the customization level as Forza racing I could see the value of wanting to go pay more money in game for a tuned car.

Anyway, its a buy for me – and if anything I think its a step in the right direction for racing games as well as xbox360 connected games. I love the passive MMO model, that was some real innovation.

@Stewart: Thanks for the great feedback! I think the biggest problem I have is that I realize you can't just floor it and expect to be able to hit every turn. That's not feasible in any situation. But you have to drive extremely fast for a lot of the missions while taking little to no damage. When feel like you don't have full control of your vehicle, this simply isn't fun. And that's where I've been stuck with it. I've got all this stuff to do, about 8 cars and 3 bikes in my garages and I've put in tons of time experimenting with the driving aids and steering sensitivity and am still having trouble with it. Maybe it's too much of a learning curve? Whatever the case, I feel that I've put in sufficient time to learn the mechanics of the vehicles and am still not comfortable with them.

There's a balance between realism and fun that's hard to nail and I feel that TDU has missed that mark. I've never driven a high performance vehicle so I don't know how they handle. I imagine it would take hours on end to really get a feel for an F430 before you're at the point where you could drive around a track without smoking the wall or spinning out. If I had a Ferrari in real life, you bet your ass I'd be willing to put that time in to learn it back to front. But we're talking about a video game here. To me, more than a few hours learning curve is unacceptable.

Lastly, I meant to touch on the direction of the game, or lack there of. The most fun I've had is just cruising around the island and exploring. It's when I started really getting into challenges that I got bored with it. Unfortunately, you don't earn any money just cruising (except for those transport challenges that are few and far between) so that gets tired quick as well.

I don't know – maybe I expected something different? In any case, TDU isn't fun and the fun factor is one of the most important to me these days. I have enough stress and do enough tedious tasks on a day-to-day that I don't need to spend my leisure time doing the same. Perhaps I'll give TDU a try again when the racing wheel comes out. Or maybe I'll just wait for Forza 2.