Based on the state of the game as of 11/25/2024. I have a deep understanding of the game and its mechanics so I can tell you exactly why this an objectively- not subjectively, objectively- badly designed game- and in theory it wouldn't take much to fix it- given time. Perhaps to your surprise I'm also not going to call it a bad game. Many of my subjective takes on why the game is bad have little to do with the countless specific gripes (often understandable, TDU2 was a very specific thing for people) various TDU2 devotees have placed it on a sadly understandably lofty pedestal to achieve. Most of them aren't even adjacent, in fact, so if you're interested read on.

The OBJECTIVE reasons this game is bad:
-AI: THE biggest objective reason why this game is badly designed is the way the AI fundamentally works. Even if they added all the Forza Horizon-esque features people seem to want out of this game, you will always be facing AI at some point, no matter how many are playing the game. So your AI needs to be beatable. Sane. You can argue particulars on that but the AI is neither of those things. They have taken measures to make it better since launch, but the AI is currently very, very good in MOST measures at being a good opponent- except the one that matters most- pacing. If an AI car gets in front of you, it will apply what appears to be a multiplier to what it is allowed to do compared to the upper limits of a human driver, up to a factor of 2. It's a crude way to describe it but it's as far as I'm concerned the most apt way. The AI, especially over longer races, will get better and better at its job, and that multiplier is only infunced in your immediate vicinity where you see it otherwise. This is absurd, objectively bad design, and needs to be fixed as soon as humanly possible. This is not speculation so much as it is observation paired with literal interviews, by the way, they have literally admitted the AI is capable of twice those limits in interviews. This applies to all races, without exception all the way up to and including Crown Jewel Ruby, a 69.7 mile race takes over 39 minutes to complete under the most ideal human circumstances- the AI will frequently run it as low as 32.

-Race rewards: Giving the exact same amount for every single race, regardless of length/difficulty, is an bad design choice, objectively, for any purpose you would use it for in a racing game. Every race starts with a base of 15000 payout, which, sans first time bonus, will net you between 10000 and 27000 extra. Once you have done everything, this is what you're left with. It's absurd and given they bill this as something they're effectively building into a racing MORPG (there's no massive, it's instanced), you need varied rewards to incentivize players to play and compete. The only exceptions to this are the Crown Jewels, which you get at the very end of the game and pay out from 50000 to 22000 (meaning the most you will realistically ever make from a single race is 380000). As if to add insult to injury, doing the race more than once in a day PENALIZES you. You will get diminishing returns for each successive same race you do in a 24 hour period.

The above have been mentioned ad nauseum and I doubt many people will find disagreement that those two factors alone are beyond damning for the game. They need to be fixed before I could in good faith give the game a passing grade.

That being said: Let me opine on the good for a bit, for there is much! Note I never said this was a bad game. In every other respect, it had an audaciously rocky launch (which I observed major fixes to within a few days of the 'early access' week) that has slowly been on the uptick.

-Physics: If you do any amount of research on this game you'll no doubt find blooper clips of cars flying into the sky like a player in Skyrim hit by a troll. Practically gone are those days. They've been running a fine-toothed comb through their map and I seldom find a place where this now occurs. it happens, but it's not going to ruin your race unless you're already driving poorly. Add to that the handling model- which is generally a fine line between arcadey and realistic, but with real-time weather that syncs to the server time and actively influences your car's handling, as well as nuance on road conditions the extends so far as 'it's night, your car will have less traction' and 'that puddle will make you regret turning in to slowly to that corner.' It's no Project Cars, but on the whole it's damned convincing. These are pretty much live 'track' conditions, for all intents and purposes. This is also one of the only open world racing games that actually DOES this, It makes joyriding immensely fun, and fast speeds appropriately dangerous.

-World design- This is, without question, the most complicated map ever recreated on a 1:1 scale. I looked it up for good measure, it is a safe bet to say HKI has far more roads to drive than Forza Horizon 4 and 5 combined. The foliage is constant, lush, incredibly detailed and destructible, no part of the city outside of the hotel feels low-poly, and racing down the road I daresay this looks like one of the most photorealistic racing games on the market, easily. Is it photrealistic in place? Not so much. But you will always feel exactly the sense of speed you should as the ATD rush by.

-Wheel support- With the glaring ommission of proper support for 900-degree steering (I would recommend 360 or 540 at most), this game has excellent and fairly customizable wheel support. It instantly recognized my G920 and H-Shifter and the game works wonderfully with the presets out of the box.

-Sound design: Barring some glitches that have cropped up on occasion, the sound endpoint is among the best I have seen in a racing game. Cars sound closer to Forza than Gran Turismo- they have very natural sounds to them, and while many of them are unified, it all sounds right. Little details like blowoff valves, the game sounding fundamentally different when you put the top down, the various sounds of the city... it's all there to thoroughly immerse you into your time with it.

Now we have to get into the SUBJECTIVELY bad:
-This is a TDU game, but it doesn't feel like one: probably the most common complaint. I would point out TDU1 was drastically different than TDU2, and much of what I've seen people gripe about is planned as future updates. They're very valid gripes. This isn't Drive Club. This isn't Forza Horizon. This game is in the TDU franchise and with that comes an expectation that currently just isn't met- the social features are incredibly lacking to nonexistent outside of races, about the only place you will see other people is in the customization area and rarely the hotel, and there is zero reason to engage with the world around you outside of racing or joyriding. You can indeed test drive a car you don't own, for all of two minutes. But there's no glue keeping the community coming back in that sense, and the events give you meager cosmetic/sticker rewards, never anything meaningful.

-Matchmaking: my gripes here are unlikely to be similar to others'. I have zero problem with facing bots in races so long as they're good. I don't even have a problem with the total lack of playlists, fundamentally. The problem I cannot abide here is that there is no indication outside of a tiny icon that anyone is... *anywhere*. You don't see "insertnamehere" is starting a race, you have x time to join them, which would probably be the easiest fix to the lack of lobbies. Given the excessive need for POI travel, trying to roam in packs often fails, too. Online almost ends up feeling like an afterthought, rather than the core thing. Just the Sharps and the Streets that you can join at level 12 (which allows you to basically gain a guaranteed 50K every day you play if you're a Sharp).

I'd like to opine more... but Steam review character limit. I'd say I got 95% of my point across anyway so.......

Based on the state of the game as of 11/25/2024. I have a deep understanding of the game and its mechanics so I can tell you exactly why this an objectively- not subjectively, objectively- badly designed game- and in theory it wouldn't take much to fix it- given time. Perhaps to your surprise I'm also not going to call it a bad game. Many of my subjective takes on why the game is bad have little to do with the countless specific gripes (often understandable, TDU2 was a very specific thing for people) various TDU2 devotees have placed it on a sadly understandably lofty pedestal to achieve. Most of them aren't even adjacent, in fact, so if you're interested read on. The OBJECTIVE reasons this game is bad: -AI: THE biggest objective reason why this game is badly designed is the way the AI fundamentally works. Even if they added all the Forza Horizon-esque features people seem to want out of this game, you will always be facing AI at some point, no matter how many are playing the game. So your AI needs to be beatable. Sane. You can argue particulars on that but the AI is neither of those things. They have taken measures to make it better since launch, but the AI is currently very, very good in MOST measures at being a good opponent- except the one that matters most- pacing. If an AI car gets in front of you, it will apply what appears to be a multiplier to what it is allowed to do compared to the upper limits of a human driver, up to a factor of 2. It's a crude way to describe it but it's as far as I'm concerned the most apt way. The AI, especially over longer races, will get better and better at its job, and that multiplier is only infunced in your immediate vicinity where you see it otherwise. This is absurd, objectively bad design, and needs to be fixed as soon as humanly possible. This is not speculation so much as it is observation paired with literal interviews, by the way, they have literally admitted the AI is capable of twice those limits in interviews. This applies to all races, without exception all the way up to and including Crown Jewel Ruby, a 69.7 mile race takes over 39 minutes to complete under the most ideal human circumstances- the AI will frequently run it as low as 32. -Race rewards: Giving the exact same amount for every single race, regardless of length/difficulty, is an bad design choice, objectively, for any purpose you would use it for in a racing game. Every race starts with a base of 15000 payout, which, sans first time bonus, will net you between 10000 and 27000 extra. Once you have done everything, this is what you're left with. It's absurd and given they bill this as something they're effectively building into a racing MORPG (there's no massive, it's instanced), you need varied rewards to incentivize players to play and compete. The only exceptions to this are the Crown Jewels, which you get at the very end of the game and pay out from 50000 to 22000 (meaning the most you will realistically ever make from a single race is 380000). As if to add insult to injury, doing the race more than once in a day PENALIZES you. You will get diminishing returns for each successive same race you do in a 24 hour period. The above have been mentioned ad nauseum and I doubt many people will find disagreement that those two factors alone are beyond damning for the game. They need to be fixed before I could in good faith give the game a passing grade. That being said: Let me opine on the good for a bit, for there is much! Note I never said this was a bad game. In every other respect, it had an audaciously rocky launch (which I observed major fixes to within a few days of the 'early access' week) that has slowly been on the uptick. -Physics: If you do any amount of research on this game you'll no doubt find blooper clips of cars flying into the sky like a player in Skyrim hit by a troll. Practically gone are those days. They've been running a fine-toothed comb through their map and I seldom find a place where this now occurs. it happens, but it's not going to ruin your race unless you're already driving poorly. Add to that the handling model- which is generally a fine line between arcadey and realistic, but with real-time weather that syncs to the server time and actively influences your car's handling, as well as nuance on road conditions the extends so far as 'it's night, your car will have less traction' and 'that puddle will make you regret turning in to slowly to that corner.' It's no Project Cars, but on the whole it's damned convincing. These are pretty much live 'track' conditions, for all intents and purposes. This is also one of the only open world racing games that actually DOES this, It makes joyriding immensely fun, and fast speeds appropriately dangerous. -World design- This is, without question, the most complicated map ever recreated on a 1:1 scale. I looked it up for good measure, it is a safe bet to say HKI has far more roads to drive than Forza Horizon 4 and 5 combined. The foliage is constant, lush, incredibly detailed and destructible, no part of the city outside of the hotel feels low-poly, and racing down the road I daresay this looks like one of the most photorealistic racing games on the market, easily. Is it photrealistic in place? Not so much. But you will always feel exactly the sense of speed you should as the ATD rush by. -Wheel support- With the glaring ommission of proper support for 900-degree steering (I would recommend 360 or 540 at most), this game has excellent and fairly customizable wheel support. It instantly recognized my G920 and H-Shifter and the game works wonderfully with the presets out of the box. -Sound design: Barring some glitches that have cropped up on occasion, the sound endpoint is among the best I have seen in a racing game. Cars sound closer to Forza than Gran Turismo- they have very natural sounds to them, and while many of them are unified, it all sounds right. Little details like blowoff valves, the game sounding fundamentally different when you put the top down, the various sounds of the city... it's all there to thoroughly immerse you into your time with it. Now we have to get into the SUBJECTIVELY bad: -This is a TDU game, but it doesn't feel like one: probably the most common complaint. I would point out TDU1 was drastically different than TDU2, and much of what I've seen people gripe about is planned as future updates. They're very valid gripes. This isn't Drive Club. This isn't Forza Horizon. This game is in the TDU franchise and with that comes an expectation that currently just isn't met- the social features are incredibly lacking to nonexistent outside of races, about the only place you will see other people is in the customization area and rarely the hotel, and there is zero reason to engage with the world around you outside of racing or joyriding. You can indeed test drive a car you don't own, for all of two minutes. But there's no glue keeping the community coming back in that sense, and the events give you meager cosmetic/sticker rewards, never anything meaningful. -Matchmaking: my gripes here are unlikely to be similar to others'. I have zero problem with facing bots in races so long as they're good. I don't even have a problem with the total lack of playlists, fundamentally. The problem I cannot abide here is that there is no indication outside of a tiny icon that anyone is... *anywhere*. You don't see "insertnamehere" is starting a race, you have x time to join them, which would probably be the easiest fix to the lack of lobbies. Given the excessive need for POI travel, trying to roam in packs often fails, too. Online almost ends up feeling like an afterthought, rather than the core thing. Just the Sharps and the Streets that you can join at level 12 (which allows you to basically gain a guaranteed 50K every day you play if you're a Sharp). I'd like to opine more... but Steam review character limit. I'd say I got 95% of my point across anyway so.......