Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown Review: A Shaky Start, But Tons Of Potential

Before Forza Horizon became a household name, there was Test Drive Unlimited. Launched in 2006, it set the template for modern open-world racing games with its enormous map set on the tropical O‘ahu island and seamless online racing. Its lifestyle elements also set it apart, letting you live the fantasy of being a millionaire with exotic cars and luxury houses.

After a 13-year hiatus and several delays, TDU is finally back, with the long-awaited release of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown. With a new entry comes a new developer, with Solar Crown helmed by French studio KT Racing, previously known for the WRC and TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge series.

With five Forza Horizon and three The Crew games released since the last TDU game, the open-world racing landscape has changed significantly. Can TDU reclaim the crown?

Heading To Hong Kong Island​

Solar Crown begins with an extended tutorial, where you create your character using a Sims-style creation tool to change your facial features and clothing. You are then handed the keys to a Lamborghini Huracan and invited to put it through its paces in a restricted location to help you adjust to the controls. After completing an introductory supercar race, you are flown to Hong Kong Island to enter the titular Solar Crown racing competition.

It is an inspired and unexpected choice for a racing game location. Recreated in a 1:1 scale, the map is roughly the same size as Forza Horizon 4’s and The Crew Motorfest’s open worlds, but a fraction of TDU’s O‘ahu and TDU 2’s Ibiza. Despite its smaller scale, Hong Kong Island offers a variety of roads to explore, from wide-open highways and tight alleyways, to narrow city streets and twisty off-road trails, making it an ideal setting for races and road trips.

Everything you do earns you XP, from discovering new roads and driving through speed traps to finding points of interest like dealerships and petrol stations that restore your car. Hidden collectables and Wrecks that unlock secret cars also encourage you to explore every inch of Hong Kong Island.

However, with sparse traffic and no pedestrians roaming the streets, the setting feels lifeless. Considering that Hong Kong is one of the most crowded cities in the world, Solar Crown’s version is eerily quiet.

Fortunately, Solar Crown comes to life when you get behind the wheel.

Enjoying The Drive​

Solar Crown’s driving model is not punishingly realistic or overly arcadey, but it is engaging. Every car feels distinct, whether it is a nimble Nissan 370Z or a heavy Ford Mustang GT. Compared to Forza Horizon 5, smashing into objects slows you down, and off-roading in a supercar never ends well. There is too much understeer sometimes, but this can easily be corrected with a tap of the handbrake to get you around tighter corners. With assists off, rear-wheel drive cars are especially tricky to drive at the limit.

As for the audio, the engine sounds are excellent, but the ambient city sounds could be better. The more powerful supercars are thunderously loud, while other details like exhaust backfires enhance the sound design. The sense of speed is also better than any recent open-world racer: flooring it in a 1,500-hp Bugatti Chiron while narrowly missing oncoming traffic is terrifying.

Buying and collecting cars in Solar Crown provides a sense of ownership rarely seen in racing games. You will need to visit one of 14 dealerships, choose the paint colour, and customise the interior trim before being handed the keys. As a result, every car feels earned, giving a satisfying sense of reward. It is a stark contrast to Forza Horizon 5, where supercars are rewarded in random wheelspins. Money is limited, so you must choose wisely when buying a car. Even if you can afford the more expensive cars, you can’t buy them until you reach the required reputation level.

If you are used to Forza Horizon 5’s instant gratification, Solar Crown’s slower pace may seem like a grind, but it sucks you in as you gradually grow your collection and bond with your car.

As you progress, new event types and features, such as car customisation, gradually unlock. Once you reach a certain rank, you’re invited to join one of two rival clans: the Streets and the Sharps, each having their own headquarters. After defeating the main leader in a head-to-head race, joining them unlocks new clan races in traffic and the ability to challenge racers. Other than that, the clan system feels inconsequential.

During races, the AI racer’s skill level is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes you’ll beat them with a massive lead. Other times they will annihilate you, with no option to change the difficulty. As a result, races can sometimes be frustrating.

True to the spirit of TDU, the car interiors are fully interactive. You can wind down the windows, switch the headlights on and off, and activate the indicators if you enjoy cruising at sensible speeds. On PS5, selecting these actions with the DualSense’s analogue stick while driving can be fiddly, making it easy to wind the windows down when you want to turn on the indicators.

You also start the engine before beginning your journey, and the exhausts even vibrate as it idles – a small detail that is overlooked in most games. Combined with the engaging driving model, these details capture the joy of driving your dream car on picturesque roads.

However, the car selection is not as exhaustive as Solar Crown‘s competitors – do not expect hundreds of cars like in Forza Horizon 5 and The Crew Motorfest. At launch, Solar Crown features around 100 cars, from classic muscle cars to modern hypercars. Every car is well-modelled with faithfully recreated interiors, but the selection is unbalanced. European supercars dominate the car roster, with the Nissan 370Z and Nissan Skyline GT-R being the only Japanese cars.

While there are a handful of cheap old cars like the Citroen 2CV, some more everyday models would flesh out the selection. There are also no cars beyond the 2021 model year, making the car list dated: you can drive the ancient Nissan 370Z but not its newer Nissan Z replacement. Similarly, you can drive the 991-generation Porsche 911 in its limited-edition R guise, but the latest 992-generation model, which has been on sale since 2018, is not available.

Struggling To Start The Engine​

To say that Solar Crown’s launch has been rough is an understatement. Persistent server issues have made it one of the worst racing game launches in a long time. On launch day, Gold Edition players who paid a premium for early access could not log in, leaving the game stuck on the main menu like an old classic car struggling to start. When it launched in 2011, TDU 2 was also hit with online server issues for several weeks. But at least you could still play it offline.

Solar Crown’s internet requirement is a continuous source of contention. Every race you join tries to match you with other online players, with AI opponents filling empty slots. This means you cannot join a race if the servers are offline, or the race can abruptly end if they disconnect mid-race.

Thankfully, the server’s stability has improved since the troubled early launch, but the online requirement still feels unnecessary. At the time of writing, the servers have held up on the all-important launch day. But time will tell if they can cope with influxes of new players heading to Hong Kong Island in the coming weeks.

There is also a risk that Solar Crown will become unplayable like The Crew when the servers are eventually shut down. We are hoping that Ubisoft making The Crew 2 and Motorfest playable offline will persuade KT Racing to release an offline patch.

When you do get online, the multiplayer experience falls flat. With sessions limited to eight players, encountering other players driving around the map is surprisingly rare, and you can only have parties of up to four if you want to explore with friends. Surprisingly, there is also no crossplay support allowing you to connect with players on other systems – a grave oversight for an online-focused game. That said, cruising the streets online with friends is a lot of fun, evoking the spirit of the old TDU games.

Visually, Solar Crown can look stunning in the right conditions, but the visuals are marred with visible texture pop-in and a strange lighting glitch where your cars have a white outer glow in the daylight. It looks considerably better at night, especially in neon-lit areas.

On PS5, Solar Crown runs at 1440p/30 FPS in Quality mode and 1080P/60 FPS in Performance mode. With the latter, performance is generally smooth when driving solo, but the frame rate can drop in races when the cars bunch together. As expected, the PC version looks better, with sharper textures and a higher resolution, but the steep system requirements mean you’ll need powerful hardware to run it smoothly.

Lacklustre Lifestyle​

With no buyable houses, TDU’s signature lifestyle elements are stripped down in Solar Crown, Instead, you stay in a sterile hotel called the Solar Crown Hotel, where you can meet other players and store your car collection. Serving as the main hub when you start the game, it reminds us of Sony’s PlayStation Home social app from the late 2000s on PS3. The emotionless character models and stiff animations look like they came from this era, too. Disappointingly, other aspects from previous TDU games, like clothing shops, police, and transport challenges, are also missing at launch.

KT Racing’s post-launch roadmap for Solar Crown looks promising. In December, an update will add a new map set in TDU 2’s Ibiza Town, along with improved steering wheel animations. If KT Racing can pull it off, the future looks bright. But right now, Solar Crown feels unfinished. Its technical problems make it difficult to recommend until it gets more patches and content.

Verdict​

Solar Crown is in a tricky spot. New players used to the fast pace of Forza Horizon 5 and The Crew Motorfest may find the progression too slow, and the missing legacy features will likely disappoint returning TDU fans.

Solar Crown has plenty of potential, but graphical glitches, a lifeless environment, and unnecessary online requirements let it down. Despite several delays, it still needs more polish before it’s ready for the road. As a result, it is not quite the triumphant return for the series that it should have been.

However, the driving experience is superb, the slower progression is refreshing, and exploring Hong Kong Island is highly enjoyable. But if you can go along for the ride and overlook its flaws, Solar Crown is a rich and rewarding driving experience like no other.

3.5/5

Editor’s Experience – Yannik Haustein​

Finally, a new TDU. After sinking countless hours into the PSP version of Test Drive Unlimited, I somehow skipped TDU 2, but I was excited for Solar Crown. Having recently gotten an Xbox Series X, I was hoping for a racing game that I could kick back with on the couch and just enjoy some more casual racing with a controller. Sure, there is also Forza Horizon 5, but its constant barrage of notifications, wheel spins and whatnot always puts a bit of a damper on the actual driving part – at least in my opinion.

And luckily, Solar Crown does not do this. Compared to FH5, you have to grind much more to progress, getting to know a car better in the process – a trait that I also enjoyed in Forza Motorsport 3 and 4 back in the day. It has that “sink your teeth into it” feeling where you spend four hours or so in a session and really feel accomplished about the progress you made.

The problem is that said progress was slowed down even more due to the technical issues rooted in the “always online” requirement of the game.

As we also covered, many players simply could not sign into the game on the first day of its Gold Edition early release. Once that did work, I managed to clock a decent amount of hours in the game, but not without difficulties. Race sessions took multiple tries to finally initiate, sometimes TDU would lose connection to the server mid-race and boot me back to free roam, and sometimes it would just get stuck on a loading screen. Great.

Luckily, the progress reset bug some players encountered did not decide to haunt me as well. As a result, I was able to join one of the clans – the Streets, in my case – after beating their recruiter. Which also took a few tries, including a mid-race disconnect. In a race that is purely against an AI driver, with no option for anyone else to join in – and this also happened in races where no other human players were in my lobby. A bit pointless, if you ask me.

All of this is a bit of a shame, because it takes the spotlight away from what is, at its core, a rather enjoyable driving model, in my opinion. Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown does not handle fully realistic, of course, but it also is not exactly very arcade-y, either. Simply flooring the throttle all the time will not get you far, at least with all assists turned off.

Crashing into roadside objects slows you down, drifting can save your corner but will make you slower, and the cars do behave differently. Plus, in races, the streets that are not part of the route are not actually blocked with invisible walls, like in many Need For Speed titles, so you cannot rely on a wallride to save your bacon (and race, obviously).

Meanwhile, the AI are the rougher side. They will mercilessly go for gaps that are not there, and they always seem to have their elbows out. As a result, races can quickly become a contest of getting to the front as quickly as possible or trying to survive the 8-car battle royale with the least amount of time lost.

The more difficult AI opponents, meanwhile, can be downright unfair. I have often had races against “Experienced” AI that were simply uncatchable once they managed to get past me, which can be frustrating.

On the audio front, I do like the sound design – but the same cannot be said about the graphics, which are lacking that “wow” factor. TDU SC looks better at night, especially with puddles on the road, but overall, it is a bit flat. The character models in particular reminded me of circa 2010 WWE games a bit, but for a racing game, that is not too important.

The map design would be a bit more important – and while the Hong Kong Island recreation is excellent, it is not really filled with life as you would expect. Pedestrians are nowhere except as spectators in areas where you usually do not realize they are there, traffic is a bit rare – everything screams bustling metropolis visually, but it does not actually bustle. Which can be a godsend when driving, of course, as there are less things to hit.

Overall, I like the approach of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, but the tech difficulties are not really excusable – and neither is the “always online” route. Which is a shame, as underneath all the issues, there is a pretty good driving game – it’s just that it could and should have been much better. For me, TDU Solar Crown is a 3/5 for now.

What are your impressions of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown? Let us know in the comments below and join the discussion on our forums!