Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown

My Saturday night tournament crew has a rule: if you can't load in, you can't play. Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown would get kicked from the table before anyone cracked a drink. After a 13-year gap since the last entry, KT Racing and Nacon shipped what should have been a triumphant return to the open-world racing genre, and instead delivered something that reviewer after reviewer described as feeling more like an unfinished early access product than a full release. The core of the game has genuine appeal. You create a custom avatar, pick a clan to represent, and work your way up through the Solar Crown competition across a sprawling 1:1 recreation of Hong Kong Island. The map is genuinely impressive in scale, covering urban neon-lit streets, elevated highways, and tighter rural switchbacks. Race types include circuits, sprints, time attack challenges, Domination Races where you cross gates to avoid last place, and Clan Races for faction standing. You can test-drive any car before buying it, speed cameras and hidden wrecked classic cars are scattered across the map for reputation grinding outside of races, and the handling lands in a satisfying middle ground - weighty and requiring proper racing lines, but not so sim-heavy that it chases off casual players. If you have a force-feedback wheel, reports from wheel users suggest the feel is genuinely good. Here is the problem stack, though, and it is tall. The game requires a constant internet connection with zero offline fallback, which means that every server hiccup - and there have been many - locks you out entirely. You cannot pause a race. There is no manual AI difficulty setting; instead the AI scales dynamically, creating situations where some races are trivially easy and others feel brick-wall impossible with no way to adjust. The progression economy is painfully slow: credits earned per race are modest, top-end cars cost millions, and the game even charges extra credits for paint colours that differ from the default. Performance on PC is a known issue - the engine demands serious hardware while delivering visuals that look several generations old, with character models and car renders that multiple reviewers compared unfavourably to titles from the Xbox 360 era. If you have a mid-range GPU and were hoping for a locked 60fps, dial expectations back significantly. For a game built around the idea of a social MMO racer, the world also feels sparsely populated - both in terms of actual player encounters and in-world life like traffic and pedestrians. The four-friends-on-a-Friday scenario that the series fantasy promises is undercut by the fact that there is no couch co-op, no split-screen, and that the always-online architecture means your session quality depends entirely on server health at any given moment. Long-time TDU fans who remember buying virtual real estate and socialising in TDU2 will find a thinner experience here, with many of those lifestyle features absent or promised for later updates. If you can catch it in a stable state and at the right price, there are enjoyable hours here for anyone who wants to cruise a detailed city map, collect real-world licensed cars including Lamborghinis and Alpines, and grind a reputation system at their own pace. The bones are sound. But with 37% positive Steam reviews and a launch that burned a lot of goodwill, this one needs more time in the garage before it earns a confident recommendation.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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