► CAR’s review of Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown
► Return of a legendary name in racing games
► Open-world and, frustratingly, always online
Test Drive is one of the oldest racing game franchises… ever. Older than Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport, Burnout and far more franchises besides.
After years of strait-laced racing games, the Test Drive Unlimited series was a real pioneer in the open-world racing genre, offering a huge map to play around in and tonnes of cars to buy, customise and race at your disposal. The first TDU in 2006 offered the entire island of Oahu on a 1:1 scale to explore, with the follow-up – Test Drive Unlimited 2 – doing the same with Ibiza. For me and so many others, it was a keystone of my racing game line-up as a kid.
So, when it was announced that the series would get a new title, it’s kind of a big deal. This time, it’s described as a ‘massively open online racing game’ and requires a permanent internet connection.
This latest title launches on 12 September 2024 on PC, Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch. Here, we’ve played it on an Xbox Series X with a controller.
What’s new?
Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown – a rather wordy title, if you ask me – gives you the entirety of Hong Kong island. Like previous titles, the island is designed to a 1:1 scale, with hundreds of miles of roads, dirt tracks and secrets hidden within for you to explore.
TDU has always been about the culture behind being a car enthusiast. It digs deep into customisation of your cars when you buy a new one, allowing you to carefully select the factory colour, wheel type and even interior trim – the latter particularly being something that’s simply not focused on in any other racing franchise. The same applies with TDU: SC; more than 100 cars are available for purchase, and each one comes with a multitude of real-world factory colours, plenty have more than one factory wheel choice or interior colour scheme. Each one has a performance score and can be upgraded with various mechanical and cosmetic modifications – sometimes a requirement to enter different races.
The island of Hong Kong has loads of areas to explore. Developer KT Racing has included classic car ‘wrecks’ for you to find and collect (like the barn finds in the Forza Horizon series), as well as money and reputation bonuses to seek out. You can tackle into the neon-trimmed city streets or venture out into the mountainous core of the island, explore the enormous dockyards and even go subterranean in numerous underground car parks. And, like previous TDU games, the game logs what roads you’ve driven on, providing challenges and bonuses the more you explore the island.
The ’Solar Crown’ part of the title is in reference to the core racing championship that grounds the game. It’s a nod to a championship in TDU2, and has been set up by the fictional (and seemingly obscenely wealthy) Radiant company. No really – this Radiant built a Burj Khalifa-rivalling hotel ‘just for the event’ for you to stay in. Which is a shame, as previous TDU games had a large selection of homes to buy and keep your cars in – although TDU:SC’s developer has said it’s looking into bringing player houses back in a future update.
The story goes that, essentially, Solar Crown has come to Hong Kong, challenging racers and car enthusiasts to various races and events with the aim to become the champion and win the Solar trophy. As well as standard races with other competitors (both AI or real people – this is an always-online game, remember), there are time trial sprints, drift events and more for players to experience. What’s new is that inclusion of two car enthusiast gangs you can join: the Streets and the Sharps. The Streets will remind you a lot of characters from the Fast and Furious franchise – they’re rough around the edges, race for the fun of it and keep their activities more underground. The Sharps, meanwhile, are much more suited and booted, living for splashing the cash and showing off.
There’s that classic bit of TDU cheese to the relatively loose story, with laughably wooden characters that are there just for exposition and the tutorial elements of the game. And the developers have been keen to make sure players really work to earn their cars, too – buying a new one will take several race wins, and they’re not handed out like free sweets as if you’re playing a Forza game.
KT Racing has outlined a whole year’s worth of free content updates, too, including multiple seasons of new races, exclusive cars, the launch of an in-game casino and even the return being able to play on the island of Ibiza.
How does it play?
Well, this is where we quickly headbutt into the whole ‘always online’ thing. The game was dogged by days’ worth of server failures that even prompted KT Racing and its publisher Nacon to compensate players that bought the edition that allowed access to the game early. Work by the games team to get those servers up and running was swift, however, and the team even braced the game’s servers to handle as best it can the influx of new players starting on the game’s general launch day of 12 September.
But that’s not the only snag. You need a MyNacon account simply to access the game. Despite filling in the information to set up account, you’re required to verify the account by email – an email which, in our case, never arrived during our first try. We waited 24 hours for a verification email, giving up and then trying a different email account which bafflingly worked instantly. Our limited time with the game thanks to these hitches is why we’ve labelled this as a ‘review in progress.’
The online element means you have a constantly active map full of players – great for making the game feel alive and provides opportunities to race real people pretty seamlessly when it works. But you’re at the behest of having a stable internet connection or relying on TDU’s own server limitations; when we tried to modify our first car – an Alpine A110, no less – a ‘server error’ message popped up preventing us from simply upgrading it. That’s a first in my experience of racing games.
Graphically, you get the impression TDU:SC wants to look like a cross between a Forza Horizon and Need for Speed game. And it kind of works; colours are bright, night driving looks deep with contrast and depth, lighting looks realistic and TDU’s level of detail for including things like realistic driver’s instrument clusters with mileometers and in-car graphics working accurately is fantastic. Ditto elements like allowing you to turn on your indicators or raise/lower your car’s roof. There’s not Gran Turismo 7-levels of detail here, mind, with the odd graphical quirk – but it’s fine.
There’s real depth to the sound, however. Every car we’ve experienced so far sounds impressively accurate, with exhaust noises bouncing off walls, turbo wastegate flutters kicking in (with cars that have them applied, obviously) and noticeable changes in the engine and wind rushing sounds between having the roof up or down on a convertible.
Which helps to disguise some of the car’s handling characteristics. It’s not bad, per se, but anyone looking for simulation-like driving should look elsewhere. Steering around corners is frustratingly slow at low speeds, which is a bit irritating in a game that rewards you for simply exploring your environment at low speeds, and the brake sensitivity via the left trigger feels almost binary. That said, get in the rhythm and you’ll be drifting around the city streets pretty quickly, and there’s a great sensation of speed – which is knocked off pretty quickly when you hit a lamp post. Whoops.
Some elements just feel a bit long winded, fiddly or clunky, too. Having places to walk around like your hotel room (where you can customise your look and track your progress) is a neat bonus, but dealerships are bizarrely enormous buildings where you feel like you’re walking to the corner shop at the end of the street just to check out another of the dealer’s available cars. The map, too, feels like it needs work, with very small text that’s difficult to read (even on a 50-inch 4K TV) and some clunky menus.
Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown – first verdict
We can’t give our full verdict yet as we still need more time with the game, having only played a few hours.
Our first impressions of TDU:SC, though, are mixed. It’s great to see that so many of Test Drive Unlimited’s niches like deep car customisation and a tremendous amount of care taken with the details, the game pops with colour and it’s admirable to really have to work to grow your car collection.
But the handling characteristics of the cars are veeeeeeeeery arcade-ish, which will put some off and some elements of the game feel a bit clunky. I, unfortunately, am joining the chorus once again to extoll the misery and difficulty of an always online game. Is it that hard to provide an offline mode?
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