Open world racing games of the last decade have become inextricably linked with slot machines, making it feel like each race, level-up and achievement gleefully spits out a new car for you to deposit at the back of your garage and ignore once that fleeting dopamine high has disappeared. If other open-world racers have players sat on stools amidst rows of one-arm bandits, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown wants to take you back to the more refined and exclusive blackjack tables where you have to earn what you win.
That’s the key defining factor between Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown and a Forza Horizon or The Crew. Your car collection is intentionally constrained, you’re pushed to spend more time with your starter car and slowly upgrade it to be more and more competitive in the early races, working your way up to be able to afford something in the next category. Hypercars are aspirational prizes here that you won’t have until much, much later in the game.
Built around the impossible invitational road racing competition of the Solar Crown – so powerful and lucrative that it can clear the Hong Kong streets for its sanctioned races, and can hand you an AI-powered contact lens as you step out of the quadcopter – you aim to gradually build up your car collection, and to work your way up through the ranks of one of the two racing clans: the Streets and the Sharps.
It’s an appealing conceit for those who pine for games of yesteryear, though the actual gameplay loop will still feel very familiar. The fundamentals are still to head out into the open world and take on the limited selection of races and time trials that have been doled out to you, blaze through high-speed traps, and that’s pretty much it. There is a race variant called Domination, which is all about earning points for your positioning as you pass each checkpoint, but it doesn’t really lead to more topsy turvy races.
Racing is generally fun, and some events can be really rather challenging and rewarding if you’re in the car performance sweet spot – cars do feel nicely distinct too, even if we’re a good bit short of a simcade experience. However, things do suffer when you’re low on grip. The AI drivers don’t handle tight turns and wet or gravel racing particularly well, and honestly, given how it feels to turn on gravel, I don’t blame them too much for that. Strange, given KT Racing’s rally game lineage.
The world is broken up into multiple regions, and the opening hours will take you to the three main chunks of city on the northern side of the island, each giving you one batch of events at a time, before you eventually unlock off-road vehicles and can explore the middle. It’s deliberately slow, and there’s a bit of grind and repetition as you need to hit Reputation milestones before a new region is unlocked, and even to unlock better car upgrades. There is a further sprinkling of events as you join a clan, can challenge its leaders after meeting their Rep requirements, and more, but it’s another area that the game keeps things reigned in.
Having a 1:1 recreation of Hong Kong Island is quite simply fantastic, though. Comparing it to maps, certain tweaks and changes have been made to accommodate certain game landmarks, and most likely with turning hiking trails into car-worthy tracks, but it’s a largely faithful recreation, and there’s a certain je ne sais quoi about real roads compared to fictionalised and more heavily adapted ones. There’s a mundanity in places, some congested sprawl and single-way passages, and the general size of the city along the top of the island feels true to reality.
However, it also doesn’t feel like a real city in other ways. Traffic is obviously never going to hit the same level as in reality – honestly, we don’t want traffic jam simulator – but I feel like Burnout Paradise and PS3/360 era Need for Speed games have more cars clogging up traffic lights and road. Maybe my memory is wrong on that comparison, but more traffic, more life in Solar Crown would have been great to see. That also extends to the actual buildings as well. There’s a lot of recreated landmarks and features sprinkled across the island, but there’s also generic shop fronts and tower block fascias that don’t have quite the same diversity that you can see in Street View.
A lot of that homogeneity is masked when driving at night, the world coming to life under artificial light and the reflections in the cars really popping.
Regardless of the game’s merits, the experience is being let down on the technical side of things. The launch for premium edition early access was heavily disrupted by server issues, and while KT Racing and Nacon have sought to shore up their servers for the full launch, that’s a risk to occur again this weekend. Is always online play truly necessary? It certainly speaks to the game’s ethos, but I can’t say I’ve really missed out only playing against CPU drivers and occasionally one other player. It is bizarre that there’s no cross-play, though.
More disappointing is the visual and performance quality. Performance mode on PS5 struggles to hold onto 60FPS, and while it’s sometimes down to lots of activity with a bunch of cars on screen, it seems to also be triggered by things like clattering through scenery, turning lampposts into physics objects. This could be a CPU bottleneck, which is potentially more difficult to fix.
There’s also some image quality oddities and clear compromises to get things performing well enough on console. There’s a persistent shimmering white reflection (for want of a better term) from the rear bumper of your car and tyres in third person view, and in the cockpit view the edges around your windows are distractingly untinted. World lighting seemingly comes from below, as your car and character have the undersides of limbs and edges illuminated in pre and post-race scenes, and the artificial glow makes brighter car colours just look a bit odd. Then there’s things like the awfully half-rate and smeared rear view mirror.
It’s far from a technical powerhouse, and we hope that KT Racing can improve this showing, though the issues depend on your platform. On PC, it seems to hang together that bit better, though it is overly demanding of my Ryzen 5900X and Radeon RX 6800 rig. Meanwhile, the Xbox version, even outside of server issues for last week’s Early Access launch, has presented us with several game crashes halting any desire to continue with that platform before it’s been patched. Factor this in with your buying decision.
There is something to Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, though. Again, the overall structure remains appealing, and there’s moments at night where it looks rather good. It just needs time and effort to continue to grown and improve. KT Racing has announced an Ibiza map for later this year, and some returning features through 2025. There’s also plenty of fan requests for things like buying real estate, broader missions outside of races and time trials – in other words, some more distinct thematic events and features from previous games.