At this point, it feels like beating a dead horse. If you read our original review of TDU Solar Crown, you’ll know I appreciate the ambition but realised how flawed it was. If you saw the brief interim update to that, you’ll know how much I loathed the gigantic issues caused by its always-online nature.
I really wanted to like Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown – both the original games hold a small place in my heart and just seeing the name make a comeback was a delight. Was it ever going to be perfect? No, given the relatively small stature of developer KT Racing and the concern caused by numerous delays, but I’m sure many of you were rooting for it to be a success.
So much so that since that update, I’ve continued to try and play the game despite its flaws, clocking in about another 15 hours of attempting to enjoy it.
The emphasis here is on attempting. Numerous bugs were exposed in those weeks following its launch, most frustrating of all any map progress being reset meaning you had to slog around the map to get to events. It wouldn’t be so much of an issue if the world felt alive, but despite being an MMO, it’s a very lonely place.
That, it turns out, is because lobbies are restricted to eight players and the servers are neither cross-play nor cross-region. That would also explain why, despite every race forcing you to matchmake for other players, it’s incredibly rare you’ll find anyone but AI. Oh, and don’t even think about having much fun in ranked races – hardly anyone is playing them.
Yet utterly broken AI continued to expose itself and made racing a bore. You had no hope of beating them if they were on form – continuously setting times that would decimate real players’ world records – and driving into you as if you didn’t exist in the first place. This isn’t even factoring in the numerous server issues that continued to plague the game.
In this time, there was one saving grace. KT Racing continued to hint at a big patch coming to the game, promising to fix over 300 bugs, but communication was vague. ‘SOON’, we were told so often to the point it became a meme, and that was all we had.
Then, a dev diary landed with creative director Alain Jarniou and game director Guillaume Guinet, and this was hopefully going to be them acknowledging the game’s major issues and offering a clear plan of what it was going to do going forward. It turned out to be anything but.
You can watch the full thing for yourself, but to summarise, it felt dismissive, deluded and outright a little insulting to players. Crossplay and cross-region gaming were dismissed as ‘technically not possible’ despite pretty much every other multiplayer game out there in 2024 figuring both of those things out with significantly higher player counts, the AI’s impossible difficulty was put down to players’ skill issues, and no real explanation was given of what exactly the upcoming patch would fix.
Oh, and that ‘compensation’ for players who had paid full-whack for the Gold edition on release and were unable to make the most of early access due to server issues? Still no commitment to what that would be, or when it would be coming.
Then the patch landed. It didn’t exactly start off well, with what ended up being 24 hours of server maintenance despite a ‘few hours’ being advertised – oh, and you could still log into the game but be met with an unexplained ‘lobby connection error’ for the latter part of that. Worth mentioning that no in-game mention of maintenance was explained at that point, so you’d have to keep your eye on KT’s sparse social updates.
Finally, the game was playable and… oh dear. What has it fixed? Well, the map progression at least appears to be sorted but that’s all I’ve spotted. There have been no patch notes explaining the details, but it seems the AI are still god’s gift to racing, technical issues with the game remain and races are as devoid of players as ever. Oh, and some car prices have risen dramatically without any notice.
This could’ve been redeemed with the long-awaited Solar Pass starting, meant to inject a bit of life into the game. Three months worth of content.
How insulting it turned out to be. There are just 25 tiers to progress in that period and the rewards? Stickers, stickers, stickers, a bit of cash, stickers, some wheels, emotes, stickers and a sole Audi RS e-tron GT to add to an already spartan car list.
No new events came to complement this and while ranked rewards have now been added, the only one you want is the Pininfarina Battista. A car which you have to finish in the absolute top-tier ranking to earn, won’t be given to you until December and by which point will then be purchasable anyway which kills any desire to try and grind for it.
Compare that with Forza Horizon which every month adds, without fail, at least four new cars to the game and a plethora of reasons to play for them. If you’re going to do a live service game, at least make it worth coming back to.
Honestly, I’ve just lost any desire to try the game. I booted it up for 10 minutes the night before writing this, took one look at the map and just decided to play something else. For now, I’m done with Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, and I’m not sure I’ll ever care enough to come back.
