Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown was provided by Nacon for review. Thank you!
Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown has been one of the most eagerly anticipated racing games. With the Test Drive series lying dormant for over ten years, I wondered if Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown would bring the series back to its former glory experienced on the PS2 and Xbox 360, offering players a large map to explore, a car collection to build, houses to buy, and a social experience as you meet other drivers.
Sadly, while Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown does tick some boxes, I think most fans will be left wanting.
Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown seems awkward between the classic open-world racer of Test Drive Unlimited 1/2 and the modern open-world racers of The Crew and Forza Horizon series. It tries to be a jack of all trades and becomes a master of none.
The car physics, for example, is a highlight for me. The cars are made to feel weighty and realistic, and it feels good to drive them. The sounds are pretty decent, too. They're not as good as The Crew Motorfest sounds, but they help drive home the power of your cars.
Unfortunately, although the car physics are reminiscent of the Test Drive Unlimited games of the past, the open world is straight out of what you might find in Forza Horizon or The Crew: a more dense environment with plenty of debris and clutter. The two don't mix well. In Forza or The Crew, you can largely push through most debris with little penalty, but with Test Drive, in the pursuit of realism, hitting a safety barrier or a lamppost can easily halve your speed from 140 MPH to 70 MPH, ruining your race.
When driving through downtown Hong Kong, there are plenty of lamp posts, barriers, fences, hedges, and lines of trees. It becomes very difficult to avoid them. It is frustrating that a slight slip-up can cause such a catastrophic result, and it can quickly descend into figuring out how to go around the 90-degree corner without touching any bushes or scenery.
The game's AI exemplifies issues like this. The game uses a performance point system, similar to what almost all racers do now. But in Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, the AI with more performance points seems to mean, "We go faster on straight now." You may have your car at the performance point ceiling for the event, but that doesn't mean an AI won't breeze past you going 30 MPH faster than you are, only to brake excessively for the upcoming corner so you can overtake easily.
The AI seems to operate on a different level to players, having impossibly fast cars occasionally and then purposefully slowing down at points that allow players to catch up. It feels like you're playing a racing game from the '90s or '00s when this kind of thing was common before developers figured out how to make competent AI that followed the same rules as the player had to. The fact that many events have cars at performance level 400 and others at 550, competing at the same speed as each other, proves that the AI is programmed to go at set speeds and isn't using their car. It isn't very pleasant.
Perhaps the most egregious of all is that this game has no AI difficulty option. So, if you find the AI too difficult or easy, you'll just have to deal with it. If you're not an experienced racing game player and losing every race, you can't do anything about it.
This may be a victim of the game's online-only, almost MMO-like setup. The game tries to matchmake every time you start a race, with the developers clearly intending for you to play with players, and the AI is only a fallback if no players are found. Unfortunately, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown did not have a very good launch, and player numbers are thin, meaning you likely won't find any players to play with. In all the races I did for this review, I found 0 players while matchmaking, so you best hope you can compete with the AI.
If you were like me, you would probably be excited to hear that the world of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown was a 1:1 recreation of Hong Kong Island. Unfortunately, what makes Hong Kong, well, Hong Kong, is the bright lights and the bustling streets. This is a heavily urbanized area, and the game just does not pull that off. The world is empty and bland, there are no pedestrians to speak of, and traffic is light, likely for gameplay purposes. There's also no traffic during the races, which is pretty disappointing. And with traffic being handled server-side, I occasionally experienced some lagging and random pop-outs.
Yes, some of the streets light up in some colors at night, but even then, there's a tremendous lack of bright signage for shops and businesses. Occasionally, your car will light up pink as you pass a certain store on the side of the road, but that's about it. The fact that the developers seemed not to emphasize the critical points of the city of Hong Kong makes you feel like they may not have even researched the area properly or at least didn't care enough to represent it well.
There's also a feeling of blandness and emptiness in what you can do. Games like Forza Horizon have activities in the game world, such as drift events, jumps, slaloms, and speed cameras/zones. Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown seems to have limited itself to just Speed Cameras and the odd collectible immediately highlighted on your map whenever you go anywhere near it. You get bonus reputation for exploring and finding all the roads in the game, but it feels like there isn't much point in doing so, as there's not much to find beyond the odd car wreck that you can restore and some credits lying around.
I went exploring in the rural, driving offroad, which felt a bit too icy for my liking, and there was just... nothing. On the dirt roads, there was no traffic or any hidden secrets. No special places were hiding some treasure, no hidden buildings that unlocked a new feature. There just seems to be very little reason to explore the world.
Unlike previous Test Drive Unlimited games, you can't find houses to buy that expand your garage space, which is a crying shame, as I know that was a much-requested feature of many fans of the series, including myself.
The progression is also a bit of a bugbear with me, with most cars (nearly all) being locked behind level walls, meaning you need to earn enough reputation to buy a car, not just credits. You may have been able to afford that car you saw, but to purchase an upgrade to your first car, you'll need to play for several hours to earn enough reputation. By this point, you'll have finally earned the right to buy that Alfa Romeo 4C with that powerful 240HP engine... Except I started in a Nissan 370Z with a 350HP engine...
Visually, the game looks okay, but I can't tell you too much beyond that because Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is an unoptimized mess. Running at 1080p Medium settings, my Ryzen 5 5600G and RX 6600XT PC varied between 25 FPS and 60 FPS, depending on my area. Given that I can run Forza Horizon 5 at 1440p Ultra at a rock solid 60 FPS, AND it looks better, this is a pretty dire set of affairs. I couldn't test and see how it looks on High or Ultra, as I don't have access to a high-end gaming PC that can handle that, even at 720p.
Lastly, there are indoor environments, and my main question is... why? This is a driving/racing game, yet every car showroom, the clan headquarters, your hotel room, the hotel lobby, the workshop where you tune your car, you get the idea. They ALL have walkable areas where you have to park up, go inside, and then slowly stroll over to the console and press a button to do something that should have just popped up as a menu as soon as you entered the building.
Like many things in Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, it feels like poor game design and a little pointless. I'm playing a racing game, not an RPG, and I don't want to wander through the interior of buildings, meet NPCs I don't care about, and be given new quests.
Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown does have some potential. It's billed as a live-service game, as you might expect these days, with the first year's roadmap already planned out, which includes adding an in-game casino and map expansions. But rather than add all this new content, I think they need to fix its underlying faults first by improving the AI, giving us difficulty options, stopping dictating what cars players can and cannot buy, and adding more reasons to explore the game world such as additional activities and buyable houses or worthwhile secrets to find, and at least doing some optimization to what is a mess of a game right now.
Unfortunately, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown uses the SARD Anti-Cheat method, an AI-powered Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat that does not, and likely never will, support Linux. Playing it is impossible on Linux devices such as the Steam Deck.
Besides driving assists such as Traction Control, ABS, and a Suggested Racing Line, the only accessibility option in Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is the ability to turn subtitles on/off.
Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown could be so much more than it is. But the game feels rushed, with some poor game design choices here and there, such as locking most of the cars behind a high-level cap, meaning players will need to play hours just to drive... a Corvette... With the lack of activities in the game, you have little choice but to grind races repeatedly to earn credits and reputation to buy a single car.
The reputation gained from exploration is low, and the credits that can be earned are non-existent, with a race earning several times what a single secret credit pickup rewards you. While driving around in free-roam can be fun, there's no progression to be made, unlike in other games in this genre, so it feels largely pointless.
Suppose you have friends who are also going to get the game. In that case, it might be more of a fun time, but as a single-player game in which many people will be given a low player count, I can't recommend you look at Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown right now. The AI is poor, there's a lack of variety in the activities you can do, and the game's general performance isn't great.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown has a couple of good points, but right now, the bad outweighs the good. Plus it doesn't work on the Steam Deck.
