Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown Review

Developers probably enjoy having the opportunity to work with a big license. It provides steady work and gives them the chance to refine and innovate on a continual basis. In the case of KT Racing, that license was for the FIA World Rally Championship, which resulted in a number of official WRC games over the years. But with the rights expiring and moving over to EA, the developers started work on a new project. Sticking with their experience in racing, the team decided to bring back the long-dormant Test Drive Unlimited franchise with Solar Crown. While this open world racer tries to imitate the current genre leaders, the end result is a largely underwhelming experience that needed further refinement in almost all areas.

The narrative is thin, as one might expect from a racing game. You are apparently one of the drivers selected for their potential talent, and invited to compete in the Solar Crown competition that takes place on the Hong Kong Island. After creating your driver avatar, you get a quick taste of a high-end race before picking out your modest starting car and venturing out into the island. Here, you will have to earn reputation (experience), in order to unlock a variety of new races, car types, car upgrades, and so on. The game propositions that you are trying to impress actual onlookers, but this aspect is weakly executed and rarely mentioned again. It's perhaps better than having something as aggressively annoying as the story and characters of TDU2, but it also leaves the new game without much identity.

Your progress through the campaign is heavily reliant on earning the reputation/XP. At each 5 levels out of 50, the game unlocks new content, such as new car tiers, upgrades at the shop, and events. There are also two clans to join - Streets and the Sharps, which defines your side in the meta-events that happen over time. The HQs and characters of these two factions are different, but there's not much gameplay alteration - you are just picking a side. You'll also have to earn a reputation (another experience meter) with your clan, for mostly cosmetic rewards such as clothing items. Eventually, you can challenge members of the clan to races and make your way through that side of the story.

There is a heavy reliance on those two reputation/experience meters, and unfortunately progress slows to a crawl after about level 15, which takes around 7-8 hours of play. The game quickly runs out of content, as new events only appear every five levels, and there's not that many of them - so you are bound to repeat races quite often on the way to level 50. Sure, you can do some random typical open world activities, such as speed traps, finding cash rewards, and discovering roads, but the experience points they provide are a drop in the bucket. You can also perform optional challenges, which are a variety of objectives such as buying a specific car, driving a certain distance with a car class, finishing top 3 in a specific race or posting a target time. But these optional tasks also run dry very quickly, or don't actually provide any reputation/XP - only cosmetic rewards or cash. So the campaign could have really used better pacing or more content, as the grind sets in far, far too early.

The racing takes place across the Hong Kong Island, which has reportedly been recreated with a 1:1 scale. The setting is, quite frankly, drab, and lacks any highlights or immersion. There are a few urban centers, some twisty highways, and unpaved roads in-between, but overall this could have been any generic tropical open world, and nobody would bat an eye. There is no effort to showcase the setting - like Forza Horizon or The Crew Motorfest would do (games that Solar Crown tries to heavily emulate). There are no tidbits or themed races or even clips about the island, its history, or its culture. It's a rather static and forgettable open world; the weather and time of day changes, but you're mostly just driving around doing the same things as any other open generic world racer (no police or true MMO-like features here).

There are a couple of other things that Solar Crown tries to do to separate itself from the pack. The cars you drive have extended interactivity, such as being able to open windows, turn on wiper blades, turn off headlights, and manually operate turn signals. You can also visit a few social spaces where other players are - such as the main hotel lobby, the upgrade shops, and car dealerships. In the dealerships you can walk around and look at cars that you may wish to buy, and take them for a time limited test-drive. Other players can also be there doing something similar. In the upgrade shops, your car is on a display, where you can interact with menus to do upgrades; other players could also be there working on their rides. These kind of outside-of-the-car experiences were highly unique back in TDU and TDU2 days, but at this point games like The Crew Motorfest have adapted similar features - though fairly rudimentarily. Unfortunately Solar Crown doesn't innovate or present these interactions with much finesse or immersion. Seeing other players in these spaces is purely random, and for many locations you are often the only person there.

This leads to another ambition of Solar Crown - to be a live service game that requires an always-online connection. This has been an ill-fated recent trend with racing games - from Gran Turismo to The Crew - and it has backfired in most cases, even for those higher-budget games. Without a connection to the servers, the game is unplayable and you cannot get past the main menu; if you are in the middle of a race, you just get kicked out. And just like those other games, being always online doesn't even add anything of significant value to the experience. The game has an abysmally low 8 player cap in the immediate area, so you are unlikely to run into other drivers anyway. The Crew Motorfest had similar issues, but it at least tried to haphazardly emulate a living world by filling it with AI race drivers; Solar Crown's world just feels devoid of activity or a racing competition.

The online focus extends to the race events, where upon entering any race you are actually put into a lobby. You can go ahead and just start the race, which then gets filled by AI opponents, or wait and see if anyone matchmakes into the event. With no crossplay, we've had little success in filling out all 8 slots for races; usually 2-3 players at most join. This means majority of your races will include AI drivers, and there are problems here as well. There is no difficulty option, and the game very rapidly escalates their rating - within the first few hours, you will be racing against Expert-tagged level drivers. They are also often using cars with higher performance rating than you can achieve - another strange design oversight, as you cannot get better car parts until reaching those influence target levels, and yet the event is available to you at the current influence level and pits you against those strong opponents. The AI mostly follows the racing line, and they do not rubberband too badly - but they do ignore the physics and weather, and are mostly frustrating to race against. One positive thing that can be said is that they do on a rare occasion make mistakes and crash out, which is nice to see.

Other strange design choices include the clan races - these are team races where you are earning XP not just for yourself but also the clan. You'd expect that the team race rules apply – i.e., as long as most clan members finish high up, you don't need to actually win the race. But that's not the case - the only thing that matters is who comes in first, and their clan is considered the winner. Clan races allow civilian traffic, which at least causes some awkward AI crashes to give you a chance.

And so, onto the racing itself. The handling in Solar Crown leans heavily toward arcade, beyond even what The Crew or Forza Horizon offer. Though you can tweak traction control and racing line, it's still a fairly straightforward handling model. After earning enough influence rating, you can unlock selectable drive modes, which offer adjustments to the feel of the car such as increased top speed but reduced control and braking ability, and so on. You can also select different tires before the race, in case of rain or going off-road. That's not to say it's all that good or enjoyable - the cars definitely feel floaty, and bumping into anything could easily send you ten feet into the air. So while the game has an off-road category, it really means "not pavement". You never go truly off-road in the traditional sense, just some gravel and sand roads; going into the bush creates ridiculous physics havoc. But perhaps the most annoying gameplay decision is that any sort of debris - bushes, trees, lamp posts, which the streets are full of - significantly slow down your car. Drifting can be easy, but also slows you down notably compared to holding a clean line. This makes it almost a purist type of racing model, which doesn't seem like a fit for the rest of the design. And, annoyingly, neither of these elements seem to apply to AI drivers.

The race event types are uninspiring, offering regular races in lap and sprint flavors, as well as solo races against the clock, and a domination race type. In the latter, the checkpoint gates actually award points, and the idea is that you only need to hold first place long enough to win, regardless of the final race standings. There are also special Solar Crown races, which are the game's PvP offerings where AI is not allowed; these races allow you to earn a skill rating over the course of a season for some rewards at the end.

Elsewhere, car customization in Solar Crown is quite limited. You can buy performance parts in a few different categories, but new parts don't become available for many, many hours so it's not something you think about. Similarly, the car selection at the dealerships is limited until you reach higher influence levels - for example Lamborghini becomes available at influence level 40, which is probably 20+ hours of play. There is an argument to be made that games like Forza shower you with supercars too early and too often, but Solar Crown is probably the opposite extreme of that. And even if you enjoy this sort of approach, having to work for your cars and make each one feel earned, the means to get there are just too dull and repetitive, and too slow. When you do get a few more rides, you might realize that the only visual customizations available are exterior paint, windshield paint, and a very limited selection of wheels. There is a livery editor, which charges money per sticker applied, and there is no function to share this with other players. It's all rather disappointing.

Getting new cars may take some saving up. The game is quite determined to charge a lot of cash for almost everything (except fast travel, thankfully). New exterior and interior paints and other visual customizations, new car performance parts, it all costs money. While you can unlock some clothes for your driver avatar from the clan influence progress, you can also buy new clothing from the store. Events don't bring much money, though perhaps somewhat by design, as there aren't really that many cars to buy until you've grinded through races. Still, replaying events reduces your earnings, and cars in Solar Crown are not cheap. When you make enough, the vehicle selection is limited, but is at least licensed - from Ford to Ferrari, Porsche and Nissan, the about 30 brand selection is decent, but they may only have a couple of cars on offer. That's why only some manufactures get their own dealership, while others get grouped into national ones, such as American or German dealers. Players will also come to realize that the slim roster of cars isn't very balanced, either - some cars are plainly better, especially those with AWD, and this is reflected by the leaderboards for each race featuring the same vehicle for the majority of the best times.

To put it plainly, Solar Crown is not a great looking game. The visuals are very dated, with low quality textures, very flat lighting, poor weather effects and limited damage modeling on the cars. Draw distance is poor and object pop-in is frequent on Xbox Series X. The human avatars are crudely animated, though no worse than The Crew Motorfest. Even in Quality visual setting mode, the game does not look like it has a chance to compete with the full-priced leaders of the genre. Switching to Performance mode, the framerate jumps to 60fps, and the visuals take a further hit to their appearance. Worst of all, despite the low visual quality, neither mode can maintain a steady framerate, with frequent, heavy dips below the intended baseline, impacting the gameplay on occasion.

Not having a huge budget for high quality visuals is one thing, but there's fewer excuses for things like poor UI design and bugs, which Solar Crown also possesses. The world map is terrible, with miniscule icons that are impossible to read comfortably on TV screen without zooming far in, such as to see the details of the race or if you've already completed it. To do most actions, like turning off headlights, do avatar emoticons, post quick-chat messages, and change radio stations, requires bringing up a huge menu wheel that blocks your view. Needless to say, using it while driving is a hazard. Another huge hazard is the constant appearance and disappearance of civilian cars, which can happen at any moment in races and just open world roaming.

There was also the bizarre decision to put radio information over the top of the minimap, partially blocking it when songs change or you switch stations. The game has a The Crew-like audio ping that indicates that a collectible car wreck is nearby, but it's barely heard over the radio. The radio includes a typical selection of stations, from classical to rock and techno, again without much Hong Kong flavor to it. The song selection is definitely on the discount side as well, so you won't be hearing any radio hits - though there are a few good tracks from lesser known artists. Elsewhere, UI issues include errors such as Drive Modes indicating that it would reduce your acceleration, while the stat actually shows an increase. All event graphics have generic supercar street racing banners, which throws you off for a moment when you try to find off-road events. Lastly, the game forces you to make a separate Nacon account before starting play, which is always annoying.

The long-in-the-works return of the Test Drive franchise is a disappointment. By almost every measure, Solar Crown falters in comparison to its arcade racing competition. And even the unique elements that the franchise once held are either missing or are barely implemented. The game has a decent island to explore, but it lacks atmosphere or interesting places to visit. The locations you do get to see are often poorly rendered and the visuals struggle to impress, or to hold a steady framerate. Racing itself is simplistic, and often hampered by frustrating AI. The always-online elements are severely unnecessary. It's also a game that lacks content - from the car selection, to the number of races. This review was delayed to give the game a chance to begin its first Solar Season, which promised new events and content - but that DLC has been unceremoniously delayed by two weeks, which seems solemnly befitting. Like the recent Alone in the Dark Reboot, or PayDay 3, this wasn't the big comeback that the franchise was likely hoping for.