Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown | Review in Progress

After a dozen years of absence, the Test Drive franchise is back, as we go back to perhaps its most beloved iteration: the open world Unlimited series. We spent a good couple days playing it… well, trying to play anyway, but we will not have a review in time for the embargo due to a series of issues we encountered in our Xbox version of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown. But was the rest of the package worth the wait?

The beginning of the end

We received the game shortly after I finished working on Friday, with me happily looking forward to spending my weekend racing through the vast 1:1 recreation of Hong Kong that this open world racer promises to offer. Developer Kylotonn has made various pretty good WRC games, culminating in the very thorough WRC Generations, so them tackling this project sounded fitting. Indeed, things started well enough: after a not particularly impressive intro from a technical standpoint, it didn’t take long to hit the asphalt with a sports car, getting the hang of the driving, admiring the sceneries, absorbing the game’s light lore. As for that, it’s as simple as it gets: the Solar Crown tournament from Test Drive Unlimited 2 is back, this time in Hong Kong, and we have to impress high-paying rich customers and investors in all kinds of street races, offroad events and more, amid all sorts of luxurious hotels and big cash payouts. That’s about it, so far, unless the game is planning a crazy plot twist later on.

The game’s beginning put us on a much smaller island, where the game’s slightly futuristic air vehicles, floating neon lights and more immerse us in a tech-oriented slice of Hong Kong – that, I have to insist again, is a 1:1 recreation of Hong Kong in terms of size. Here, through two qualification races and a bit of open world exploration, we are finally officially admitted to the prestigious Solar Crown competition, and brought us to the similarly highly technological hotel room, where a giant display on the vast window with stellar view grants us a quick look at our daily challenges, driving statistic and much more. Some more cutscenes, okay, let’s leave through the hotel lobby and go back to racing, shall we? The game crashes. Oh well, let’s try again. Crash. Once more. Crash. Houston, we have a problem.

More crashes than a demolition derby

See, the review copy we received for Xbox Series X|S has had an enormous issue. After investigating a bit, I realized where the core issue lies. Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is, for lack of a better term, an MMO-like racing game, at least per the developers’ intentions. From what I saw in the game, this doesn’t translate to a new approach to racing games, merely to something akin to Forza Horizon or The Crew games – as in, every social area like hotel lobbies, car dealerships or clans are packed with other real players. Cars can be compared, people can be met in the open world and challenged or befriended, and so forth. One funky change is that, when we start a “standard” race in the open world, we don’t just necessarily play against the AI only, but real players can join the matchmaking too, making such events a lot more exciting and memorable.

Allegedly. You see, every single time the game supposedly created a matchmade session, be it for open world, a dealership or whatever, the game crashed with no other players found. 100% of the time, automatic crash. You can see why this is a massive problem: virtually every single aspect of this game is built around online interactions, so that’s A LOT of times being booted to the dashboard. This began a journey that is… quite hilarious in hindsight but that’s been awfully frustrating. I tried so many things. I rebooted the console, including leaving it unplugged for a while. I emptied my cache. I redownloaded the game and moved it to a different drive. I even hopped from my Series X all the way cross my Series S console. Nothing of the sort worked, but I didn’t want to give up just yet. Once, the game even crashed during the opening videos with the various studio logos – what’s going on here? I initially suspected a hardware failure of some sort on my end, but it turned out that was absolutely not the case.

I’ve found the way! Maybe! Sorta!

Once, I managed to make the game fail matchmaking by accidentally taking a screenshot during the loading screen, which froze the screen for a good second. At this point, I was able to get out in the open world and do events – but the problem arose again as soon as I entered any social activity, so I needed a consistent solution to rely on. Thus, my bizarre experiments began. Taking a screenshot (or video) was not working every time. So I tried to “overload” my console by moving games from one storage to another, spamming screenshots, do other stuff during the matchmaking: again, it sometimes works, but more often than not it does not. I tried unplugging my Ethernet cable at the right moment, which seemed to be the most effective solution at first, but that one is also unreliable – not only it requires precise timing, but sometimes the game just reconnects to a lobby when I plug it back in, making me crash again. I even tried to switch regions at one point, after speaking to a developer. On a new continent’s server, I had to restart the game from scratch, and the sad punchline of that was that the issue persisted just the same as soon as I reached the dreaded hotel lobby again.

You see, I can’t just stay completely offline either: this is an online-only game, with online profiles and saves. You have to always be connected to an extent, but the only way to play has been to bait the game into making me alone in my lobby. Eventually I did an attempt with a fresh account that doesn’t have Xbox Live Gold/Game Pass Standard for online gaming, and it did seem to work better – but not only I didn’t want to lose hours of progress that I did manage to get, I also have seen little reason to completely preclude myself from most online features when reviewing an… online game. And a full review of an online game ignoring the online functions would feel… rather incomplete.

Why did I insist in playing so much, despite all the technical troubles? You see, I’ve been looking forward to this game for a good while, so despite still waiting for a proper answer from developers in the first couple days, I was trying my absolute best to overcome these issues myself, to perhaps manage some progress for the looming embargo window on Wednesday, 4th of September 2024 – a mere 5 days after receiving the game. A day, in which, our save progresses are set to be wiped completely due to a progression exploit the developers wanted to fix, making it even less useful to continue slamming my head into the wall with one or two days to go. I really wanted to have a review ready in time, which is equally important for the developer/publisher and for our site as well. I am not even close to exaggerating when I say I endured over 100 crashes, sometimes I screwed around for an hour just to manage to enter the open world once – only for the game to boot me to the dashboard again as soon as I needed to visit a specific location, buy a new car or upgrades, and so forth.

Never give up! Well, maybe do give up at some point…

At the time of this writing, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown on Xbox has been virtually unplayable for me, so I decided to stop meaningfully trying to do so until the issue is somehow solved – be it via a patch, a developer helping me in some way. The day before this article dropped, I finally managed to speak to some developers, who tried to help me with this issue that seems to be down to netcode woes, even generously giving me a PC copy of the game as well, so that I can test out the game some more, access certain content I’m unable to play on Xbox right now. There, just as I had to restart progress when I switched to a different region on console, starting a save on the Steam version made me again begin anew. Despite sharing a unified Nacon account, there is no cross-progression it would seem. At the very least, the most devastating crash sequence related to matchmaking is not something that happened to me there, though I’ve found this version of the game to be rather lacking in optimization, with even the minimum settings demanding a whopping 7GB of VRAM while not exactly looking all that great at that point. Developers assured me that they are looking into the issues I brought up anyhow, hoping to find a solution as soon as possible.

Hopefully, that happens by the game’s availability to the public, which happens in early access via buying the Gold Edition on September 5 – one day after publishing this article. Even beside the devastating crashes, the game does have a handful, more forgiveable technical problems: a lot of the lights and reflections act strange, there’s a lot of object pop-up (even for traffic) when driving around the open world, and I encountered various framerate drops during my time playing too. On Series X the game, for the most part, sticks around the stable 60 frames per second in performance mode and the less enjoyable 30 frames per second in graphics mode. Unfortunately, the Series S version is capped to 30 frames per second either way, which is rather sub-optimal for a racer in 2024. But given how demanding the title is on PC, I’m not at all surprised. Let’s hope that Solar Crown will join the long list of games that launched with only a 30fps mode on the cheaper of the current Xbox consoles, but that does eventually get a very good 60fps (if not downright 120fps) mode down the line.

But what if it works?

Through a lot of perseverance, I still managed to play a handful of hours, by intentionally limiting myself to features and modes that would no longer require a matchmaking session once I entered the open world. AI-only races, no new cars, I only upgraded the starter vehicle a single time when the story demanded it – but to do this single last thing, I still had to endure like half an hour of crashes. I’m unsure if other reviewers or content creators are facing this issue, as well, as nothing in the documents we received indicated the online would be this problematic. Is this a pre-launch issue? Is it specific to Xbox? Will it happen to a lot of people on September 5 or the regular launch on September 12? I have no answer to these questions, but I can talk about how the rest of the game felt thus far. And that is: a fun game, combining some surprisingly ambitious ideas with various formulaic aspects as well.

You may remember the classic Test Drive Unlimited experiences, with some of those gameplay designs also impacting other behemoths in the genre since – Forza Horizon, recent Need For Speed games and The Crew titles in particular. Now, it’s time to cash in on the favour it seems, because the open world structure and progression could be virtually lifted from just about any such game – Forza Horizon in particular. A myriad of roads to discover (they’re even greyed out until first driven on), checkpoint-based short races to attend across the map both on streets and off the road, 3-star top speed challenges on certain longer straights. Hell, even the GPS is a fictional in-game AI with a female name and female voice, that not only serves us to give us directions but also to tell us about new events or suggestions in general. Not a Forza Horizon copycat, in this case, as Test Drive Unlimited did it before Forza Horizon back in the day. Still, after a decade or so of open world racers with this exact structure, I would have hoped Solar Crown would do something a little more unique, though perhaps the later hours in the game could bring some changes.

With most open world exploration boiling down to finding a few points of interest and collecting generic stashes of cash or other bonuses, the vast open world does feel a little bit empty and devoid or unique activities – for now. Developers did hint at various classic features from prior games possibly coming back in future updates, such as houses to buy, casinos and more, but I’ve not really seen any special on-foot activity in my playtime in the current version, aside from car dealerships, two joinable in-universe clans and car meeting points. But since these are the places that made my game crash the hardest, I spent as little as possible there. Maybe as the game progresses some other activities open up, but I had no way to get that far yet. At least the open world is vast and stylistically very pleasing, even though many assets feel rather outdated by today’s standards. And while I criticized or questioned various aspects of the game design, don’t get me wrong: Solar Crown is, for what I played, a very fun game that I intend to come back to for some time, as patches and content updates will hopefully make driving this virtual Hong Kong a real joy to play.

Racy racers racing together

Recent racing games very often focus a lot on giving players a “social car experience”, even before necessarily nailing down the general gameplay. I feel that, to some level, this applies to Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown as well. The game wants to show you other players, their times, their cars everywhere you go, but there seems to have been less focus on making the races feel all that great. They’re enjoyable, don’t get me wrong, but the handling doesn’t feel as rewarding as in many other racers, and the race experience, too, feels rather vanilla. What’s cool is that players get to control every aspect of the car at any given time: turning lights, headlights, roof, wipers – anything can be manually used both in open world and in races alike, which will surely make for some funny social interactions as the game launches.

Speaking of the “vanilla” experience I mentioned: here’s no damage model of any sort, no penalties for dirty driving whatsoever, there’s no slipstreams, there’s no combo systems or whatever to encourage spectacular and clean driving either. It is, by all means, a very safe, old school racing game in this sense, with the track design quality being quite hit and miss too, due to how tracks are merely extracted segments from the open world’s city for the most part. Due to the aforementioned slightly stiff driving model (at least on the starter car, since I was unable to buy others without the game crashing), tracks with tight corners can feel rather painful, especially when you have cars behind that will not mind using your rear bumper as an extra brake. Again, the game doesn’t even attempt to encourage driving any differently, so anything goes. I didn’t yet manage to play an online race, and I explained why, but I can already foresee chaos that will make a Forza Horizon lobby look like a meeting of fine and polite gentlemen.

Wombo combo

It’s odd because the combo system exists in the open world, so you can get some nice credits bonuses for driving in the wrong way, dodging cars, drifting and more, with the game immediately interrupting your combo at the slightest tap of a wall or another car. There’s even the chance of cashing in on your rewards early or continue the combo and aiming for much higher rewards, however at the risk of losing it all when you misjudge a corner. It’s like Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, but at 150mph. So why is none of these mechanics in the actual races? I guess I understand the developers wanting to keep the actual races as pure and simple as possible, so that we focus on the actual racing rather than looking at a combo meter, but this being an arcade game and not a simulator, it’s odd that there’s no incentive in trying a little drift or a near miss with traffic here and there.

The game has a lot of cars with a myriad performance upgrades and tons of customization too – even the interiors and glasses can be changed. Granted, due to the aforementioned technical issues, I could barely do or see any of that, so that’s something I will have to revisit. Indeed, game modes were, so far, limited to standard modes like regular races, time attacks or duels. There’s at least a mode where crossing checkpoints gives points based on the order, with the winner defined by who has most points, not necessarily who is first at the finish line – but realistically, that’s another mode where you need to gain the lead as soon as possible and keep it, otherwise it will be too late to catch up. The game doesn’t seem too keen on rubberbanding, so messing up early on in such a race means that you may as well restart it altogether. I’ll see, once I manage to progress, if newer, more unique game modes end up unlocking.

Looking forward to actually reviewing the game

For the complete failure of the online portion of the game in my Xbox copy, an issue that caused me over 100 crashes by the time you’re reading these words, I have been unable to check out most features and content in Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown by the time the review embargo ended. As such, we decided to write this review in progress to still give some early impressions and, perhaps even more importantly, to give a heads up that this issue may happen to you as well. We’ll only publish a “proper” review a couple days after the game works more or less as intended, as I will need time to eviscerate the many aspects of this big online-based open world racer. I am crossing my fingers that these issues will be solved, or that my case is some sort of freak accident that nobody else ever encounters, because in this state the game is simply not playable, not functional, making an actual score gravitate towards a 0 out of 10. We debated whether even publishing such an article, as we rarely do reviews in progress, but we felt it important to give our readers a heads-up that there’s a chance their experience may be extremely broken like mine. Time will tell if that ends up being the case or not.

For the hours I did sort of manage to play, however, I did find a game that feels a bit underwhelming on a technical level and in terms of driving model, and yet is still fun and enjoyable, despite some derivative open world and social features – on paper, anyway, as the latter never seems to work for now. Even barring the glitches, I feel that the game definitely requires some work and iteration over certain aspects and features, but that has the chance of becoming something special with time – or perhaps, even later on in the launch version itself, once I get to that. It may be a rocky launch, but not all is lost, as there’s quality to be found here as well. We’ll keep you updated and will provide a full review of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown as soon as possible.