Nearly 10 years ago, former Need for Speed developer Ghost Games copped a kicking for making its 2015 series reboot online-only, even in single player. In response, its 2019 follow-up Need for Speed Heat did not require a persistent online connection. Earlier this year, Ubisoft decommissioned The Crew, making it impossible for owners to play from now on – even by themselves. The move wasn’t received well. This very week Ubisoft has confirmed The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest will now get offline modes. In contrast to these course corrections, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown arrives in 2024 as another online-only racing game that seems to have little interest in being something that’s satisfying to play solo. It’s a baffling start and, despite a nice handling model and a lot of effort on display in its unique open world, it unfortunately doesn’t get any better.
The original Test Drive Unlimited was a pioneer of MMO, open world racing. It was the pioneer, really, and remarkably ahead of its time. However, despite being fondly remembered for its trendsetting online philosophy, 2006’s Test Drive Unlimited still had a dedicated single-player mode (one that remains accessible and playable offline today). It simply layered its multiplayer mode over the top of it.
The always-online Solar Crown is not built like this, and it’s infinitely poorer for it. There are AI opponents, but there’s no dedicated single-player mode to speak of – just a map full of events that other players may or may not hop into at the same time as you. During my time with it, prior to the standard edition release date, another player joining my race has actually been an extremely rare occurrence. But the threat of it is always there, because there’s no way to opt out.
This puts Solar Crown in a very weird place. It means that, even though my experience has almost exclusively been competing solo against the AI, I’m still burdened by all the foibles of online racing. This means lobby countdowns I can’t fully skip before starting a race, even though I don’t want to wait for anyone else and wish to start by myself. It means races I can’t even pause, which is an absurd problem to have when playing entirely against AI – and totally contemptuous of parents and anybody else with the audacity to ever need to… stop what they’re doing for a moment. It also means races don’t even have a simple, quick restart option; to restart you need to abandon the race entirely, re-enter the event, and sit through the same lobby period. Even when you’re the only human in an event, if there’s a connectivity issue during your race, you’ll be kicked out. If there’s a problem in free roam, you’ll be kicked out to the menu screen. Hell, if there’s some sort of server maintenance or technical snag when you boot up, you won’t be able to play at all. In my most recent session I haven’t been able to play for more than a few minutes at a time before being kicked out. Every online-only requirement feels like a punishment for playing it by yourself. You don’t want to play with other people? Too bad, you’re online anyway.
Turn That Crown Upside Down
Unfortunately, the racing itself is not strong enough to make these online quality-of-life sacrifices worthwhile. At its best, on Solar Crown’s most well-plotted race routes, the racing is… fine. At its worst, however, it’s tedious and unsatisfying. The AI opponents are a constant sore point, and they undermine the experience by being rubbish in some conditions and supernaturally gifted in others. Solar Crown features a handful of named difficulty levels for its AI opponents but, unlike other racing games, it does not let us manually select their strength. This means Solar Crown automatically bumps up the difficulty as we progress. The spike, however, from ‘Experienced’ to ‘Expert’ is hideously ill executed – so your reward for good performances against the ‘Experienced’ opposition is simply a bad time.
Now, I should stress that you don’t actually need to win, or even podium, in Solar Crown’s races to earn credits; a better finishing position just results in a little extra gravy on top of a base payment for completing the race. There is, however, a list of secondary objectives that regularly do require you to be at the pointy end in specific events. This can be daunting against rival racers who – on some courses – will simply gallop away from you in cars that ostensibly have the same performance level as yours, recording race times that can be faster than the quickest human players on the current global leaderboards.
This is a ridiculous problem to have, and it’s one you can’t solve by simply opting out of the Expert AI setting. Again, we don’t actually have the ability to adjust it. It’s also not as straightforward as selling a car you’ve discovered is uncompetitive in the current class you’re grinding through and buying something that seems quicker, because you can’t sell cars. If you’ve just dropped a ton of credits on something that’s not working out, it’s back to the grind until you can amass enough to try again. It’s set to be quite a grind, too; some of Solar Crown’s hypercars are priced at over 10 million credits, whereas a typical win only nets you around 20- to 30-odd thousand. There are no driving missions here like in the old TDU games; it’s just basic racing, repeated. As far as I’m concerned, if a game starts to feel like a job, something is amiss with the pace of progression.
At any rate, the only solution is to complete and lose races, and wait until the automated difficulty decides to do you a favour and bump things down a notch – to a place where the AI racers aren’t capable of driving faster than the entire player base. This is a total waste of time, but it gets worse. After being stalled chasing the objective on one particular race, Solar Crown started slashing my payouts and XP for subsequent attempts. By the time I eventually completed the goal, the credits and XP had been cut to a pittance and were virtually worthless. Several days later I noticed the payouts had returned to normal, but nothing about an apparent cooldown period on rewards is communicated to us in-game. Why are we being strung along with come-back-later mechanics like mobile gamers? Solar Crown just doesn’t feel like it respects your time.
At the other end of the spectrum, in wet weather conditions, off road, and on certain circuits, AI opponents can be counted on to be much weaker. The counter intuitive thing here, however, is that these instances of slow or boneheaded AI tended to arrive as moments of relief – especially in the wake of a race I’d lost by, say, not being the single fastest person on the planet.
To clarify, the racing isn’t unsatisfying because it’s tough; it’s unsatisfying because it’s inconsistent, and it often feels like the AI is cheating. There’s nothing fun about sinking a huge amount of credits into a car to put it at the top of a performance window and having it totally unable to compete against opponents at the exact same level. It’s even worse when cars with lower performance ratings are gapping you on straights. There are clearly strings being pulled to make this happen, and that’s just cheap.
Is it better against humans? I can’t issue a verdict on that. While special edition Solar Crown buyers have been playing since last week, I’m really not encountering anybody. Only once have I started a race and been grouped with someone else apparently starting the same race a few seconds later. If anything, the racing was worse; the AI bots that filled the remaining six slots in this case seemed twitchier, heavier, and drove like I wasn’t there. But beyond that, nada. There are dedicated ranked races on the map, but they don’t appear to be attracting anyone yet. I’ve sat in the lobbies for those and have seen no one join me. While other racing games will pool interested players into quick races, Solar Crown seems like it’s relying entirely on people just… deciding to trigger the same race at the same time.
Stressed Drive
Levelling up will eventually unlock new tyre compounds and pre-set driving modes that let us eek some more speed out of our cars, but there’s so much contradictory information in these options it’s hard to know what will ultimately help. At level 30, I decided to purchase a Nissan GT-R and scanned the driving modes before my first event. Dynamic mode, which claims to boost acceleration, only lowered my acceleration stat. Sport mode, which Solar Crown reports will lower my acceleration, actually raised it. So what do I go with? What’s going to help? Well, it’s slower than the rest of the field in either configuration, so who can say? It’s a mess.
The annoyances continue. The world is particularly handsome at night in the neon bathed streets, but there are sections that suffer reproducible pop-in, or objects cars can clip through. When on foot, button prompts disappear the instant you run too close to the door you want to open or person you want to speak to. You can’t easily invert the camera – you have to manually remap the controls for forward and back on the stick. Locations I’ve already discovered and have unlocked fast travel to are becoming unavailable. I can no longer use them for fast travel, despite the roads around them clearly indicating I’ve been to them before (and Solar Crown ultimately knowing I’ve been there before, because it won’t re-reward XP for “re-discovering” them). Driving to places I’ve already unlocked is more wasted time, so it’s a bug a game that’s already filled with time-sucking, always-online caveats and non-adjustable difficulty settings definitely didn’t need. On top of that, roads driven on during races don’t actually count as driven on in your game; you have to drive over them in free-roam to add them to your tally. Is this intentional, or just another bug? Hard to say, but either way it’s more double handling.
It may sound by now that Solar Crown really gets nothing right, but that isn’t true. Crucially, it boasts a predictable and approachable handling model that’s easy to get to grips with. It’s arguably a little understeery, and the drastic speed reduction from hitting roadside destructables feels too heavy-handed for an arcade racer, but it drives quite well and is definitely a step up from the divisive feel of Test Drive Unlimited 2.
There are also a lot of things I enjoy about Solar Crown’s Hong Kong map. There’s a good mix of variety in terms of road width, from extremely narrow one-way alleys and accessways, to snaking hillside roads reminiscent of KT Racing’s own WRC games, to wide freeways and tunnels. There’s an eye-catching level of complexity to Solar Crown’s on- and off-ramps, and I really love the look of the many underground, polished-concrete parking garages that lurk everywhere under the city – complete with working boom gates.
Unfortunately, it lacks much in the way of atmosphere overall, and this version of Hong Kong certainly doesn’t feel like a living city in the same way it does in the likes of Sleeping Dogs. Sure, it’s an adjacent genre and the driving physics in Sleeping Dogs are sloppier than a soup sandwich, but it stands up as a world. In Solar Crown, people are rare and the futuristic augmented reality overlays are an eyesore. Virtual parking lane notifications are constant, ugly screen clutter, and the giant, identical AR lettering over key locations just makes everything feel the same. Of course, when you do enter dealerships – with their enormous layouts and sparse arrangements of cars – it’s evident they all look the same inside, anyway. They look nothing like the convincing dealerships in TDU1 and TDU2.
On top of that, traffic is light and doesn’t ever seem very authentic; too many of the NPC vehicles are just the same small handful of cars from Solar Crown’s drivable garage, so there’s no authentic variety.
The car selection is a letdown, both compared to its current peers and the original Test Drive Unlimited games. In 2006’s Test Drive Unlimited, for instance, a majority of the cars featured were current models released within a few years of its arrival. Classic cars still appeared, but the line-up felt fresh and cutting edge. Solar Crown doesn’t really have that same flavour. Only a tiny sliver of the cars here are even from this decade, so there’s an unavoidable staleness. Japanese cars have always been significantly underrepresented in TDU, but if you were thinking the geographical proximity at play with Solar Crown might trigger an increase, it absolutely has not. We get a 2011 Nissan 370Z, and a 2009 GT-R. That’s it.
There are some details I do really like, though, and there’s been some impressively granular work done regarding car sound. The hiss of wet asphalt or the bark of your exhaust note changing tone and volume as you wind down the window during the rain or in a tunnel is particularly lovely stuff. The visual effects for rain in cabin view still aren’t as good as the ones in the 10-year-old Driveclub, but I’ve been saying that about all racing games for a decade now.
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