Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown – Review

Hong Kong is a cool, well-realised destination and a very good setting for an open-world racing game.

A little history

The Test Drive series is one of the oldest and most long-running car game series, with the first game coming out 37 years ago, making Test Drive two years older than me. I played a few of the titles released in the late '90s and early 2000s, and while they were quite fun, I always preferred something like Need for Speed or Colin McRae or Screamer 4x4. The first Test Drive Unlimited, released in 2006, is probably the best Test Drive game and was quite revolutionary for its time. It was one of the first open-world racing games and featured an almost 1:1 recreation of Oahu island – for 2006, that map was absolutely huge. I remember playing it for the first time on a friend's Xbox 360, and my jaw dropped a bit, seeing how good it looked and how big the world was. It was fun and well-made, and it was interesting to be able to interact with other players also driving around the island.

The good

I'll start with the good parts, because they're over quickly. First of all, Hong Kong is a cool, well-realised destination and a very good setting for an open-world racing game. From winding streets to touge-style routes and off-road tracks, the city is fun to explore; there are some hidden secrets, all sorts of rewards for exploration, such as wrecks (how original) that you find and restore, Solar Credits, which is the game's currency, and underground car parks where you can drift. The city is cool, quite large, and varied enough.

Okay, now that I've finished the good parts, let's move on to the rest.

The bad

Okay, I said above that the developers wanted to make an MMO Racing game. As a result, the game is always online, regardless of whether you want to play single-player only. However, the implementation is so stupid that it turns the game into a disaster from the start. Let's say you want to play some single-player races. In a normal game, like older TDU or Forza or any other open-world game, you drive to the race's starting point, then enter the race and play it, maybe with a settings menu in between. In Solar Crown, no, you arrive at the destination, hold down the button to start, loading screen, it transfers you to the lobby, which no one will enter anyway, you have to skip, loading screen, wait another 8 seconds, loading screen, start the race. Okay, fine, it's not the end of the world. But hey, maybe you make a mistake during the race and want to restart. You think you press restart and it takes you to the beginning of the race, right? Nope, wrong: loading screen, lobby, start over. That's when you can restart, because there are other races where you can only abandon, which brings you back to the starting point of the race and you start over with all the menus. It's so imbecilic that it kills any desire to play. This is for single-player, mind you? You're forced to go through the lobby.

Now, they say this game wants to be an MMO Racing… but there will never be more than 8 players on the map, because that's the maximum supported for each instance, from which you can actually race with a maximum of… 4. For this, they made absolutely all interactions online. I have a vague impression that the guys at KT Racing or the publishers at Nacon don't really know what the first M in MMO stands for. The game is always online in an absolutely useless way; it interacts with the servers for absolutely everything you do, and if their servers happen to go down, as happened when they launched the game for those who pre-ordered the gold edition, you can't play at all, not even single-player. It's that stupid. Not to mention that the servers can go down during a race and you lose all progress – superb. Effectively a disaster.

Furthermore, on the social side, you can no longer buy houses, as in TDU 2; now everyone stays in a hotel on the island. You can't even decorate that hotel room. Basically, you can interact with other players in the hotel lobby and that's about it. You no longer have a garage to bring them to show off your car collection or anything like that. So they say they're making an MMO, but at the same time they're removing even social features that already existed in the series, so you have no reason to socialise, but they're forcing everything always online and irrevocably ruining the single-player part. Ah, both TDU 1 and 2 can be played offline without any problem. Solar Crown, no.

Anyway, let's say you get past all these problems. How are the cars and how many are there? The handling model is… okay. It takes a bit to get used to it; they say they want it to be more simulator than arcade, a stupid choice for this type of game where you want to have fun, but oh well, it's not the end of the world. It's definitely about 5 times better than in TDU 2; it's a model you can get used to, if you ignore the fact that sometimes you suddenly lose grip for no reason. Anyway, let's say you can correct that, and you get used to the slightly exaggerated understeer or oversteer when you least expect it. This is very subjective, but it's not the game's biggest problem. Honestly, the game can be fun from time to time and the driving can also be fun. Unfortunately, here's where a slight disaster begins.

First of all, there aren't many cars available. I understand, different budget, I'm not necessarily criticising that. The problem arises in the way they chose to make them available to you, i.e., the progression and reward system. I can accept when a game makes you put in some effort to receive rewards, unlike, say, Forza Horizon, which practically throws another 6 cars of all categories at you every 30 seconds. That's not good either. But neither is Solar Crown, where you get a maximum of 15-20k credits per race, but a decent car costs a million or two. It's extremely ridiculous, grindy, and difficult. And one more thing: the game unlocks new races for you based on your level, but you don't have enough races available to reach that threshold without repeating the existing ones. Also, you don't have championships or the possibility to replay those races with a different type of car, nothing like that. It's… it's disappointing. Honestly, the game always gave me the feeling that the developers worked to make the game fun, and then worked a bit more to remove any trace of fun from it. I simply don't understand how they could mess up the gameplay this badly; it's rubbish.

But hey, maybe at least the AI is competent and the races are fun and… nope, not that either. The AI is rubbish; it's aggressive, sometimes it just cheats, or it bought the right car, because here too there's a huge imbalance and some cars are mega OP, while if you get something you like, good luck, because you'll most likely lose constantly, which removes any fun that might have remained from those races. Inconsistency in everything, that's Solar Crown.

As for car customisation, there are relatively few options; other games have done it much better.

Oh, and that simulacrum of a story somehow manages to be even more cringe than Forza, but at least it's delivered by NPCs that look like it's 2007 and without any trace of emotion; they might as well have been drones instead.

Furthermore, the sound… oh dear. For the character voices, I think they used AI, because I can't imagine how a human being could speak without any tone or emotion. I turned off the music because it was getting on my nerves; I thought I'd at least enjoy the engine sounds. Which, of course, are all muted, because why not? Extremely disappointing.

Technically, the game feels like an early access title. Both in terms of features, how it looks, and how it behaves, it simply doesn't feel like a complete game, yet they want 60 euros for it. In its current state, I absolutely cannot recommend it. The developers have promised to add Ibiza and the possibility of buying houses probably sometime in the future, but excuse me, working on a game after launch doesn't mean selling it at full price without it being finished, just because it might be good in 2 years. To me, that seems a bit dodgy.

It's sad. I didn't have high expectations for this game, but it managed to disappoint quite badly. It seems like something relatively fun could have come out with another year in development, to fix the technical side and optimise it, but in its current state, it's clear it was rushed and still feels like an early access game, which is why I'm going to recommend you don't buy it, because it's a rip-off at 60 euros. I'm sorry, but that's the truth and I don't think it's okay to spend money on a sub-standard product and just promises.

Basically, if you want to play something like this, either replay the original TDU, or choose any Forza Horizon from 3 to 5 and play that. Solar Crown is simply too rubbish.

Thanks to CD Media Romania for the review code!

Played on: Xbox Series X
Release date: 12 September 2024
Developer: Kylotonn
Publisher: Nacon, Bigben Interactive S.A.

Review by Adrian Dobrescu