Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown Review: Ambitious, But Very Flawed

Rating: 3/5

19 September Update: We’ve reinstated our original score of 3/5, having temporarily dropped it to 1/5 following a frankly disastrous launch period. We'll be leaving this in place. Check out our updated review below.

Let me rewind to 2011 for a moment, as teenage me has just finished the final race of Test Drive Unlimited – a full lap of Ibiza. Of course, it couldn’t end without a cheesy cutscene, with comically cringey fictional host Tess Wintory signing off with the words “See you soon for a new season of Solar Crown, taking place at… shh, it’s a secret”.

TDU2 was a flawed game, but I enjoyed my time with it. So with those closing words ringing in my ears, I began to wonder when we’d know where the Solar Crown would be taking us next, and how long I’d have to wait to find out.

It turns out, quite a lot longer than any of us could really have guessed. As history tells us, then-TDU developer Eden Games went bust and would eventually re-open, but without the Test Drive IP in its ownership. Atari would sell it in 2016 to Bigben and plans of a series revival were confirmed, but little was ever really said of it.

Until 2020, when Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown was finally announced, with the intention of it coming in 2022. Until it was delayed to 2023. And then 2024.

Finally, here we are though, and to contextualise just how long it’s been, since finishing TDU2, I’ve finished school, and sixth form, learned to drive a real car, started and graduated from University, landed a job writing about cars and sufficiently blagged my way into a position to type about racing games too. This brings us to now, to finally play a new Test Drive Unlimited. The answers to those words still ringing in my ears, it turns out, are Hong Kong Island and 13 years.

Time doesn’t change some things though, and the cheesiness TDU brings to the concept of a luxury lifestyle simulator is one of those. Once the pleasantries of customising your character are done (and it’s a pleasingly in-depth tool), you’re picked up by Solar Crown head honchos in a passenger VTOL of all things, complete with B-rate voice acting. Test Drive is very much home.

The format is a fairly usual one. You’ve been identified as a hot up-and-coming racer who’s been handpicked to compete in an elite competition, oh and here are the keys to a Lamborghini for a bit while you prove yourself. The game does a neat job of lightly handholding you at this stage on a small shoot-off island to get your head around the controls, handling, typical environments and the basics of what it has to offer.

It doesn’t take too long until you’re dropped into the 1:1 recreation of Hong Kong Island, albeit with some creative liberties here and there. Like the towering fictional Solar Hotel you’ll be living at, seemingly ripped straight from the ‘society if’ meme template.

Developer KT Racing has been proud of the fact that this is the first time the island has been represented in a racing game, but spend some time in it and you get a bit of an inclination why. There’s not a great deal of variety to the type of roads you’ll encounter – there’s a lot of built-up city streets and large highways, cut up with a sprinkling of wide cross-country routes spread between some twisty-ish mountain roads and some dirt roads. That leaves with you with over 370 miles of road to play with, but not much of that is exciting.

The environments themselves are neatly and seemingly faithfully (having been to Hong Kong exactly zero times myself) created but there’s an eerie lifelessness to them. Traffic density is extremely low outside of highways, pedestrians appear to have decided to stay indoors rather than chance being out for a walk while rich folk are racing around and seemingly every form of wildlife has gone extinct.

The ambition of recreating the area is a commendable one, but you can’t escape the feeling that something is missing. There’s a framework there for a vibrant world, at least, but it may need time to see its full potential. Keep that thought in mind from here on out.

My biggest concern going in is fortunately one proven to be unfounded: the handling. It’s still arcade-leaning, think closer to The Crew than Forza Horizon. Cars feel genuinely distinct from one another, rear- and all-wheel drive cars behave like rear- and all-wheel drive cars and most important of all, it’s fun to drive. Kudos to KT as well for making good use of the PS5’s DualSense controller, and in particular the trigger effect when ABS kicks in.

It’s a shame there are not more cars to play with in truth. At launch, the list is pretty sparse – naturally focusing on the really high-end market but between top-end supercars and a few oddballs at the lower rungs, there’s not a great deal of depth in diversity.

There are no JDM icons beyond an R35 Nissan GT-R and a 370Z (icon applied loosely), no real hot hatches beyond an Abarth and an Alfa MiTo while big super saloons and estates are completely missing. Having such a low car count at launch only amplifies the frustrating number locked behind pre-orders or expensive special edition bonuses, too. More cars will come, but it needs to be sooner than later. Strangely, there’s a handful of cars visible in the game – like the Lamborghini Diablo and Pininfarina Battista – that are completely inaccessible to players.

Those in are neatly modelled though and although not to the high standards of say, Gran Turismo 7, it’s hard to find things to nitpick. Better still is the level of OEM customisation, which is a delightful bit of TDU tradition carried over to Solar Crown. Beyond just picking an OEM colour, most cars will also allow you to configure the interior and wheels with real-world options – and if they don’t, it’s usually because it’s a single-spec special edition.

Customisation beyond that isn’t fantastic. You can swap a very limited selection of aftermarket wheels or tint the windows, but there’s nothing in the way of body kits. The livery editor feels quite compromised compared with those in Forza and Gran Turismo, as well.

Performance upgrades have never defined TDU but the system deployed here is well balanced. Top-end mods are level-limited, which I think works neatly as you’re gradually progressing through the game’s single-player career – even multi-millionaire nepo babies competing in a supercar racing festival can’t have everything.

Oh, the single-player career. Notice I’ve not paid much attention to this point. Leading up to the game’s release, publisher Nacon has focused very heavily on the ‘Streets vs Sharps’ angle of the game. One underground clan of rejects against the established elite, using Hong Kong Island as a racetrack to compete… or something. You got the impression the game would hinge very heavily on the dynamic.

Yet, it just doesn’t. Aside from an early visit to either HQ to pick which clan to represent (I chose the streets, albeit not expecting their HQ to be a three-story nightclub surely costing millions), it only really serves as an excuse to set up clan vs clan races. There’s no real story to engross you and, aside from a few level-based head-to-heads against supposed high-ups within each side, there’s little reason to interact.

Am I glad about this? In a sense, yes, because I find the whole concept extremely cringe in the first place. But part of the charm of older TDUs, and TDU2 in particular, was the god-awful voice acting and cheesy characters that at least gave it a sense you were competing in something. Here, it feels like you’re aimlessly going from race to race for the vast majority of it.

That void should be filled by competing in other races with real-world players, which Solar Crown pushes heavily on you with its always-online nature. In fact, you have no option but to queue in a lobby every race you launch.

Despite that, it’s incredibly rare to be put in with any other players and it’s unclear why. It could be a technical problem, a limitation of allowing just eight (8!!) players in an open-world session at any one time or it could just be that nobody is starting the event at the same time. Oh yeah, there’s no pooled matchmaking option – every ‘multiplayer’ race has to be triggered by heading to its start point on the map.

That leaves you racing against the AI as if you were in a single player event anyway, just without the ability to pause anything. It really doesn’t help that AI is awful and incosistent to race. Sometimes you’ll blast them by 30 seconds effortlessly, and in other races they’ll inexplicably set race times that would decimate the player-set global world records. Along the way, they’ll repeatedly drive into you as if you don’t exist.

On PS5, the game has been largely performing well in Performance mode with a near-constant 60fps, although it’s not uncommon for some sudden rendering or the odd framerate drop, particularly switching cameras in built-up areas. Graphics mode is something I’d likely avoid on consoles at least – the game looks good but the framerate is awful. Hopefully, that’s something that can be improved with platform optimisation as we’ve seen true 4k and a solid 30fps is capable on this generation of consoles.

There are a few odd bugs too that have yet to be addressed. The environment is littered with objects you (and the AI) can clip through as if they weren’t there, and there’s only an incredibly irritating bug that resets the discovery of locations like dealerships and workshops every time you restart the game. That means you’re then having to drive to them again if you want to use them, rather than fast-travelling.

It’s taken 13 years and quite a few delays, and simply seeing a new entry into the Test Drive Unlimited series is a delight. But, should you race out to buy Solar Crown? If you’re reading this while the game is at full price and within its first few months of launch, probably not.

If it were my money, I’d hold off a few months and a few content updates, and pick it up when it’s on sale. Ibiza’s planned return in December could be a good point for that.

There’s a solid game waiting to be unlocked here, but I think it’s going to need time for KT Racing’s real ambitions to be realised. The foundations are in place but in its launch state there’s not a great deal of depth and a sense of lifelessness to things which hopefully, time will solve. Let’s hope an offline mode is patched into the game too, and that it won’t be another 13 years of whatever the god-awful closing line the game has to offer ringing in my ears.

Reviewed on: PlayStation 5