Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown review – coronation chaos

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown – not really worth the wait (Nacon)

The third entry in the Test Drive Unlimited series is finally out but the Solar Crown racing event is not off to a smooth start.

The original Test Drive was released in 1987. It was an early attempt at 3D, creating the effect without using polygons and looking more than a bit wobbly as a result. At the time though, it was an instant hit with multiple sequels arriving in the years that followed. It wasn’t until 2006 that the franchise branched out into an open world – a recreation of the Hawaiian island of Oahu – and rebranded itself as Test Drive Unlimited.

That had a single sequel back in 2011, but since then the Unlimited series has been dormant, until the arrival of Solar Crown, a new open world driving game this time set on Hong Kong Island. For those unfamiliar with the territory’s geography, it’s worth noting that this isn’t the Hong Kong filled with massive skyscrapers famed in film and TV, but a somewhat more rustic island adjacent to it.

Importantly, it’s an island that has a mix of A-roads, motorways, twisting country roads, and dirt tracks, making it well suited to a racing game that takes in a range of driving styles, and an ideal setting for Solar Crown. That may sound like a brand of weatherproof exterior house paint, but in Test Drive’s world it’s the name of a renowned street racing event.

Like its Unlimited predecessors, this is billed as a massively open online racing game, clearly intended to be a sort of driving MMO. You start by choosing and customising a frankly dreadful-looking avatar who will be racing your gradually growing garage of cars. He or she is then put up in the Solar Crown Hotel, which acts as a hub for the island’s competitive events.

Starting in your hotel room rather than behind the wheel, you’re encouraged to choose an outfit before heading to the hotel lobby, then finally the garage to pick up your car. In the first of a number of confusingly obstructive design choices, you’ll be waking up in your hotel room every single time you start the game, forcing you to go through that pointless rigmarole before you can actually play.

A similar process is used for both buying new cars and upgrading them. Rather than using a menu, you have to walk slowly around its anodyne and architecturally identical showrooms in first person, approaching each vehicle in turn to learn its stats, price, and how many reputation points you’ll need to earn before the game will let you buy it. It’s a system that seems to be designed specifically to waste your time and patience.

Compounding the weirdness of that decision is that, like Link, your driver is completely mute. That has the effect of making one-sided conversations in cut scenes seem deeply awkward, your guy or gal gesturing but never saying anything. ‘What do you think of the dealership?’, asks another character. All your avatar can do is nod politely while remaining silent as a rock.

To unlock each race event, showroom and workshop you’ll need to drive to it around the island’s roads in real time. That, at least, feels as though it makes sense, the game rewarding you for discovering its relatively expansive geography. It’s also quite fun tooling around its road system and admiring the scenery, although its comprehensive fast travel system suggests the developers realise it’s only a brief honeymoon period. This also begins to highlight some of the game’s other problems.

The first of these is its distinctly last gen looks. Draw distance is limited, the traffic you pass on roads looks as though it was imported from a PlayStation 3 game, and cars have an eerie habit of suddenly winking out of existence in front of you. More welcome is that, as in Forza Horizon, most roadside street furniture shatters like balsa wood, letting you plough through any railings or bus shelters that have been inconveniently built too close to corners.

You’ll also start to get a feel for the game’s handling model, its default setting proving to be fairly simple and arcade-like. You still benefit from taking the racing line and can tell when a car’s rear wheel drive, especially in the rain, but cars otherwise seem a bit samey. Turn down the driving aids though, and Solar Crown’s physics model feels a lot more subtle, making races trickier but more rewarding.

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown – the showrooms are a pain to navigate (Nacon)

The only downside is that when you lower the driving assists, the game also ups the standard of your AI competition, creating a sudden lurch in difficulty, which admittedly does not apply to your human rivals, but does make races harder. It’s probably a trade-off worth making for driving fans though, because it makes taking corners and actually winning races more fun and challenging.

Most of the time you’ll be facing off against real human drivers rather than AI bots, since Solar Crown is always online – which is another feature that’s brought its fair share of problems during the review period. Server outages, lengthy maintenance periods, and races that won’t start as intended have been commonplace, although those glitches have lessened as launch day approaches. That will be little comfort for players who paid £75 for early access via the game’s Gold Edition, although online reports suggest PC owners had a better time than console players.

Even when it’s working as intended, Solar Crown remains flawed but not without interesting features. Its meta game in particular is interesting and different from competitors. After a little levelling up at the beginning of the game you’re recruited into one of two rival clans, with certain race events adding to your clan’s influence, bringing a little extra motivation to your escapades.

You’ll also find there’s less emphasis on swapping cars than most racers. You begin the game with one of three starter cars, which you can upgrade with base level modifications, but the next level of cars and upgrades only become available with a higher reputation level, meaning your first few hours will be spent really getting to know your car whilst building up a nice little nest egg for the moment you can finally buy something new. There’s a similar wait for the level above that.

The slow pace of unlocks may well be because, at launch, Solar Crown comes with a selection of 99 cars. That may sound like a lot but compared with Gran Turismo 7’s over 400-strong roster and Forza Horizon 5’s 534 cars, it’s a far smaller set of options, and both those games have added many, many new cars since.

Plenty of its other problems are niggles rather than bugs and suggest it may have been somewhat rushed to market. For example, if you follow the game’s instructions on brightness and contrast settings, it renders your side and rear view mirrors unusably dark, and in any case mirrors are only visible in two of the game’s multiple selectable camera views. Instead, little arrows appear behind your car when rivals are right behind you, but it’s unnecessarily tricky to drive defensively when you’re in the lead.

Car damage does occur, but even after a head-on collision at 250kph, the front of your car just looks slightly crinkly, its headlights and detailing otherwise intact. Also, despite traffic’s habit of suddenly vanishing in front of you, roads are abnormally lightly populated and there are no people anywhere, making Hong Kong Island feel as though it’s on strict Covid lockdown.

When it works, and with reduced driving aids, there is fun to be had with Solar Crown, and as with any live service game, the hope is that patches, updates and reworks will improve things over time. The fact remains that at launch, and at full price, there are just too many issues, both accidental and clearly deliberate. In its current state you’d be way better off with either Gran Turismo 7 or Forza Horizon 5, both of which also provide a richer solo game.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £49.99
Publisher: Nacon
Developer: KT Racing
Release Date: 12th September 2024 (Switch TBA)
Age Rating: 18

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown – there is a good range of scenery and cars (Nacon)

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