Back in the day, the Test Drive series always played second fiddle to EA's mighty Need for Speed franchise. Though the early games were technically competent, there was always something missing. A soul? A sense of purpose or even a modicum of character perhaps? They always felt a little sterile, by the numbers, and far too 'safe' to compete with the slightly more rambunctious efforts from the series' peers.
The Test Drive series has passed through many developer / publisher hands. A couple of excellent efforts on the Xbox 360 aside, the series has lain dormant for a number of years, but is back with a bang - and a new stable under Nacon, who seem to be dead set on putting South Korea's gaming studios on the path to world domination, kinda like they're doing with pop music over there at the moment.
"Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown" is the latest game, honouring the series legacy of putting together a large garage of impressive vehicles, driving styles and a bit of "Sims-ey" nonsense into a package of free-roaming Car RPG-ness.
The game starts promisingly enough, putting you behind the wheel of a high powered Lamborghini but don't get too used to that hot seat, you'll soon find yourself scratching around one of the game's many car showrooms looking for something slightly more modest to throw your bucks at.
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| Hairdresser Car? Sure but it'll whip your Qashqai, boy. |
Once you've bought your first car it's time to get used to the streets and off-road trails in Hong Kong, because that's where the game puts you this time around. Previous efforts have taken place in Hawaii and Ibiza (and in fact you'll get to revisit a scaled down version of Ibiza in this game too), but now you're mixing it on a reasonable representation of the jewel in China's crown. Scouting around the map, you'll begin to realise that the game is pretty vast for an open world racer, though thankfully later on in the game you'll begin to unlock the ability to fast travel between various locations (though if you're anything like me, the whole appeal of playing this type of game is often just cruising around in a half decent ride, taking in the scenery as it blitzes past).
On the technical side the game does pretty well, though frame rates dip even in performance mode (yes yes, those of you who were moronic enough to fall for Sony's double-pump and opted for the Playstation 5 Pro might find things a lot smoother, but then if you've just spent £700 on a console you'd expect a bit of a performance hike, and TDUSC caters for the Pro with uplifts to framerates and visual clarity).
There are bugs too, and in fact early reviews of the game have been quite savage. Often I found myself unceremoniously dumped back to the PS5 dashboard, or disconnected from a game server, dropping me out of the race I was winning. Quite frankly in this day and age, that's unacceptable but the dearth of live-service games is that annoyance that comes with the damned thing always needing to be connected. Hopefully the recent legal moves to force games to provide an offline mode might trickle down to this but I won't hold my breath.
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| Nissan's sexy 370 Z - A good choice for your first ride |
The game really looks quite nice when it's running at full pelt, with lovely shiny cars and great scenery.
As far as I'm concerned though, all racing games live and die by their handling model, and that's the bit where TDUSC scores higher than a lot of its contemporaries. It has that delicious handling model where slight dabs on the handbrake swing the back end of your car around corners with ease, a model that games like Project Gotham Racing and Driver: San Francisco perfected, but it's great to see it make a stunning return in a modern arcade racer such as this.
Even with the higher-powered cars, you'll find that the handling allows you to really belt around corners at high speed, with the grip kicking in as it should rather than the phenomenon I seem to find in a lot of modern racers where cars feel like they're made of polystyrene, and can't take a corner at more than 20MPH without sliding all over the place.
Sure, TDUSC still relies on the good old 'Cocktail stick through the centre of the car' steering model that has been in driving games since the dawn of time, but it does at least feel like subtle tweaks and changes to the car's setup before races actually does make the difference between a stunning victory or a shocking defeat.
One other thing I preferred about TDUSC was a lack of "Bro-Dude" rubbish that other "Festival" type driving games seem to be raddled with. Take Forza Horizon, the gold standard for this type of game. Wouldn't you just love to be able to play it without all the 'bants' the durned thing seems to think is a requirement for any game involving petrol heads? Same goes for The Crew: Motorfest. Ditch the annoying AI, just give us the racing action without all the faffing about.
To a large extent this is what TDUSC does, though I could have done without being dumped back at the hotel at the start of every game, needing to find my way out to the lobby just to get back to the racing action (and to be honest, all that "Dress up your avatar" stuff is lost on me, but I'm sure someone out there loves it).
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| Oh no, you got your rugged off roader all dirty! Time to visit the car wash |
Once you get off the asphalt and into the countryside, the game's various cross-country (off road) modes are a nice aside, allowing you to pick from some high-powered four wheel drive behemoths to take part in point to point or circuit races against other would-be mud pluggers. As you can see from the screenshot above, the game really is very pretty and though sometimes the particulate effects cause those wretched unwelcome frame drops, it does a great job of putting a lot of atmospheric enjoyment into the game whereas others seem to overdo the neon lights and fireworks a bit too much. There's a lot to be said for keeping things simple.
As you'd expect from a live-service game, progress can be slow when you opt to grind the game's various stages and races without paying for DLC or premium gold versions of the game. This isn't really necessary, but sometimes you feel like you're completing the same races over and over again just to scrape together enough experience or cash to afford to move up to the next competitive tier. Some players will find it frustrating that cars are ridiculously expensive and races don't often net more than a few grand, so be prepared for the long haul - and also be prepared to spend a lot of time trying to get first place on the podium in every race just to make things move along a little more smoothly.
All that said, this is still a lot of fun - and if you've recently picked up the base version of the game for a shade under 30 quid, it's well worth the entry price for that as there's actually a lot of game in there and a lot of satisfaction from how differently the vehicles react and behave under race conditions.
Reviews have been overly harsh in my opinion, particularly when you consider how glowing the reviews for the last Forza Horizon (which didn't exactly reinvent the wheel, as slick as it was) or reviews for The Crew Motorfest (which is similarly slick, but a little bit soulless and boring, with a truly detestable handling model that isn't a patch on TDUs).
If you're in the market for a robust no-frills free-roaming racer, this is definitely worth some attention. Just shut up and drive!
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