Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown Review

Open-world racing games have become fairly commonplace in recent years, but before the likes of Forza Horizon or The Crew rolled out, we had Test Drive Unlimited. Despite innovating many staples of the modern open-world racer, the franchise has laid dormant since 2011, so there was a fair amount of excitement when a third entry in the series, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, was announced back in 2020.

Now that the game has finally arrived after several delays, does Test Crown Unlimited Solar Crown return the series to the top of the open-world racer leaderboard? Or should this franchise have stayed in the garage? Time to fuel up and find out.

Most attempts to deliver narrative in open-world racing games are pretty regrettable, but even given that low bar, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown’s world and story (if you can really call it a story) are exceptionally uninspired. Players can join one of two clans, the posh Sharps or the cool and edgy (“cool” being very much in quotation marks) Streets. None of the characters you meet on either side are interesting in the least, with the only benefit to joining a side being some unique cosmetics and challenges.

But again, you don’t play this type of game for the story. The racing is what’s most important, and on that basic level, Solar Crown largely delivers. The game is developed by KT Racing, which previously stewarded the long-running and generally well-liked WRC franchise, so they know what they’re doing when it comes to basic driving physics and handling. This is no hardcore sim, with cars that obediently drift around corners with a quick tap of the handbrake, but it’s a bit less arcade-like than a lot of other competitors in this space. Cars feel properly weighty and there are number of options to make the game more sim-ish if that’s your thing. The game makes good use of the PS5’s adaptive triggers for acceleration and breaking and the sense of speed when you put the hammer down is impressive, even in lower-level vehicles.

Perhaps most refreshingly, Solar Crown avoids the issues many other open-world racers have with confusing and/or overly-cluttered course layouts. This game’s circuits are generally clean, easy to follow, and free of annoying excessive debris that unnecessarily slows down your momentum. Solar Crown’s courses often feel as well laid-out as ones you’d find in a more traditional closed circuit racer, which is a rather difficult thing to pull off.

So far, my impressions of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown may sound fairly positive, but an open-world racer can’t slack on the open-world part. Unfortunately, that’s where this game wobbles. While generally quite drivable, Solar Crown’s version of Hong Kong feels lifeless, which is a bit of a feat when you’re drawing inspiration from one of the most bustling and stimulating places on earth. This game’s Hong Kong is made largely of empty roads, neat and orderly back alleys, and sterile wilderness.

Visuals that would have been considered middle-of-the-road a generation ago don’t infuse this tame version of Hong Kong with much extra excitement. This is particularly true on the PS5, which offers two visual modes: Quality and Performance. The former is almost unplayably chuggy with lots of extra visual glitches, while the latter drops the resolution to 1080p and still can’t maintain a solid 60fps, with busy nighttime races being a particular sore spot. As you’d expect, Solar Crown does look better on PC, but the game laughs in the face of optimization, with an RTX 4070 and DLSS being required to run the game at High settings and 1440p.

Beyond the general blandness, there’s just not a lot to do in Solar Crown’s open world, or at least not much that feels unique or leaves a strong impression. There are your standard race types like multi-lap circuits, sprints, and time attack challenges, as well as some more original offerings, like Domination Races, where you earn points based on your placing as you pass through gates, and Clan Races, where your results contribute to your overall team standing. In practice, though, neither Domination nor Clan Races feel all that unique when you’re in the midst of them. Beyond races, there are the baseline activities you’d expect to see in any open-world racer – speed traps, hidden car wrecks, etc. – and not much more. Don’t expect any new or novel ideas here.

Past entries in the Test Drive Unlimited series have offered then-innovative sim features, like the ability to trick out your own house and visit an in-game casino, but unfortunately, this aspect of Solar Crown is very underdeveloped. You’re given a largely featureless and purposeless apartment that grows in size somewhat as you level up, but don’t expect any real customization options. You can unlock cosmetics for your avatar, but your character is so seldom seen and so goofy-looking when it is that there is not much point.

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown’s online features don’t add much to the package. You can join other players’ races and even challenge other humans you encounter in the world to impromptu “Instant Challenges,” but both of these things are fleetingly rare as only around a dozen players will ever be exploring the map with you at once, and, usually, it feels like far less than that.

The short list of benefits offered by Solar Crown’s online features certainly don’t justify the many downsides they come shackled to. Solar Crown is an always-online game that requires you to sign up for both a MyNacon account and PS Plus or Game Pass Core on consoles to even get past the title screen. Even then, that’s not a guarantee, as I was frequently locked out of the game by server issues or the game’s inability to log me into my account. Even when I got into the game, the lobby system would frequently be broken, which is a problem because the game forces you into lobbies just in case another human player might want to join you, even though you’ll mostly play against AI opponents. If the lobby system is down, you can only do free-roam activities or single-player challenges like time attacks.

And the headaches don’t stop there! Your Solar Crown save is stored in the cloud (there’s nothing on your local drive) and anything related to saving is extremely wonky. A short list of issues I’ve had:

• Progress and XP earned from races not being properly recorded.
• Landmarks I’ve discovered not being saved.
• Time attack ghosts not being saved, or, alternatively, seemingly random ghosts showing up.
• And the coup de grâce, I completely lost my progress at one point. Thankfully, I only lost about two hours, but I’ve heard tales of others losing much more.

It’s all a bit of a mess. Updates have been released, and further fixes have been promised, but I haven’t noticed much improvement and am not particularly optimistic about how Solar Crown will perform when it launches wide this week. The unreliability of the game’s servers and cloud saves make what might have been a passable, if unremarkable, open-world racer very hard to want to invest any time in.

And you’ll have to invest time to get anywhere. Solar Crown’s devs have touted an old-school progression system that forces you to really earn cars, and sure enough, the sweetest rides require you to grind to a high level and shell out a hefty amount of in-game cash, but it’s hard not to feel like this was done to disguise a fairly paltry car list. Solar Crown only offers around 100 rides at launch, well short of the 800-something in a competitor like Forza Horizon 5, and while Nacon has promised plenty of post-launch support, “you have to wait for seasonal updates for content” and “we’re keeping progression old-school” are two messages that can’t really share the road.

This review was based on a PS5 Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown code provided by publisher Nacon.

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown offers some solid fundamentals in terms of driving mechanics and course design, to the point the game might have been worth a qualified recommendation despite its surprisingly-bland recreation of Hong Kong, so-so visuals, and spotty performance, but ultimately, the game’s egregious always-online requirements make that impossible. Persistent server issues and a completely unreliable cloud save system send this racer careening off-track and it’s going to take some serious elbow grease to get this Solar Crown shining like it ought to.

Buy for $59.99 from Amazon

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