A quick scroll of a TikTok feed here, a skip through Instagram stories there – gratification is just a swipe away.
Consequently, creators need to be thinking outside the box to garner attention.
Take the film Saltburn, which has been constructed, seemingly, to inject shock and awe at the precise moment its audience reaches for their phone – at roughly 20-minute intervals.
Then there’s the video game Forza Horizon 5 which lobs new cars, challenges, experience points, levels, hats and wheelspin vouchers your way approximately every 13 seconds.
Which is fantastic. The reward loop is as moreish as Skittles.
Yet, such strategies can take away a sense of achievement. I’m not sure if you ever really deserve such unlocks. They sometimes just appear as if by magic.
Enter Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, purportedly the antidote to our ever-decreasing concentration spans.
Instead of pummelling its player with a stream of unlocks, the third instalment in the open-world driving game series purposefully leans into a slow burn of yesteryear. Back when earning enough credits to buy your first supercar took an eternity by modern standards.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and arriving 18 years since the seminal original and 13 since the beloved sequel, for some, a new Test Drive Unlimited game is a way to relive their youth.
But, to succeed in the here and now, reminiscing only gets you so far…
The grind is real
Set on a one-to-one recreation of Hong Kong Island, you have two primary aims – reach the top of the prestigious Solar Crown racing competition (and therefore traverse the heights of the Solar Hotel base) and lead an illicit street racing clan. The latter is a choice between two: The Streets or The Sharps.
Completing those goals is not the work of a moment. While the racing is high tempo, the structure is deliberately ponderous. It aims to create a lengthy career mixed with a rewarding grind.
That formula is refreshing compared to some contemporaries, and in our testing at close to forty hours, we’d say expertly judged.
You receive just enough reputation points to keep you interested, but nothing more. A member of the creation team said to Traxion recently they wanted a ‘wow factor’ if you see someone driving a Ferrari 250 GTO as you know they have worked hard for it.
To that end, the upper echelon of the car list is inaccessible, even if you have the cash, until you are esteemed enough.
But, like a carrot in front of a donkey, you can discover new dealerships in the environment, peruse their offerings and even sit inside a sportscar, revving its engine or putting the top down.
Exploring the area brings out our inner Nathan Drake, hunting for relics, or in this instance, 28 hidden ‘wrecked’ car parts in a throwback to its predecessors.
To that end, the setting provides a mix of narrow metropolis streets, fast highways, perilous mountain paths and bright beaches. The Kylotonn development team allows you to roam at your will immediately, but it advises not to.
Instead, it has created a structure that sees you participate in race events in one district (there are 14 in total) at a time. While it may initially seem frustrating, the segmentation works.
Entering each new area feels transformative, and added to the slow burn of credit and experience point acquisition, delivers a satisfying sense of accomplishment.
You earned it, well done, now go buy an Audi TT to celebrate.
You can’t do that…
Perhaps controversially, points and cash are not the only elements that arrive at a sedate pace, so are features. Reminiscent of those early stages within Gran Turismo 7 where tracks are progressively unlocked, in Solar Crown significant elements are saved for later.
Purchasing clothes for your customised character is inaccessible until you reach reputation level five, adding tuning parts level 10 (and even then, more advanced items until much later), being part of a clan level 12 and creating a custom car setup level 20.
All part of the plan, slowly but surely keeping you hooked. Ultimately, the tasting menu structure is the game’s strong suit.
Similarly rewarding in the long run are the driving characteristics. Not as accessible as its immediate rivals, you must brake much earlier than in Need for Speed Unbound, for instance, and lean on the driving assists. Switching them off, especially in the rain, can lead to time-sapping lurid slides that your rivals are impervious to.
Do not expect it to be a simulation-like handling model, but do expect a learning curve. Each car is noticeably distinct, and as you increase in speed class, more wayward until performance-enhancing parts are equipped.
The handling is by no means class-leading, but once acclimatised, you can find a rhythm. There’s a pleasing sensation that comes from braking on time, turning in, briefly tapping the handbrake and serenely drifting around the hairpin before pinning the throttle down a straight.
There are times when you smash your AI-controlled rivals at a canter, others when a visit to the tuning shop is necessary to avoid floundering in the midfield.
Detail on the car models is exacting, over 100 real-world machines spanning decades of engineering prowess are present. Each with perfectly modelled interiors and some of the best-sounding engines in gaming – by far and away KT Racing’s best work yet, following lacklustre prior attempts.
But…
While the recreations of Bentleys and Lamborghinis are exquisite, the roster does feel outmoded. Over 100 sounds plentiful, but when you consider some cars like the Ford GT or Audi R8 have multiple derivations, the reality is fewer individual shapes than you may expect.
While historic vehicles are well represented, there’s a distinct lack of models from the 1980s and 1990s, then a deluge of cars from the 2000s and 2010s, followed by a dearth of 2020s additions.
Patchy, but as this is a title expected to live on for years to come, we hope this is all part of a plan.
Presumably, so is the always-online connectivity. This is an MMO. It’s been designed that way from the outset. You can find other players in your world, challenging them to a spontaneous race. You can also bump into friends within car dealerships, or complete career events together.
In our pre-release testing, racing online worked smoothly, albeit with a slightly clunky loading time between challenging a rival and the race beginning. What remains to be seen is how stable the servers are come launch day. We also encountered some prolonged server maintenance. Hopefully not a sign of things to come.
Irrespective of online performance, while the glacial progression system is a considered choice, the actual races themselves lack sparks. There are essentially time trials or short races, with a domination variant of the latter and the ability to cut through traffic when participating in a clan-specific event.
Such prosaic formats are a letdown considering the projected total experience length. Too often the races felt familiar after the first 10 hours.
It’s strange too how, despite Hong Kong being one of the most densely populated locations on Earth, here it can feel a little soulless.
Worse is the technology used to power it. This is not the first open-world game using the proprietary KT Engine basis, see the Isle of Man TT releases, but it is the first of this scope.
You can feel the game engine creaking under pressure like tree roots attacking a building’s foundations.
On PlayStation 5, when it rains or there’s a busy section of a race, there are clear performance dips where progress slows down with skipped frames even in the so-called performance mode. On PC, in our testing, Solar Crown is extremely resource-intensive.
The rear-view mirrors are so choppy they are borderline unusable, the rain animations look like someone has smeared Vaseline onto the windscreen, sometimes there’s a strange lighting effect that makes the car change colour and there is obvious ghosting when in chase cam.
Occasionally, you can see lights flickering and shadows wavering. Generally, these quibbles are footnotes for most games. But here, the visual frailties do become an obvious demerit, especially in light of The Crew Motorfest’s sensational looks.
Mercifully, at night, several of these complaints are masked by darkness.
That’s not all. Character model facial hair looks drawn on and having plastic surgery at the beauty salon is kitsch – still, creating some sort of long-lost Gallagher brother has a certain charm.
Steering wheel peripherals are supported, but when the animations are locked to 90-degree angles, it seems pointless. This will be addressed later, so says publisher Nacon. Your computer-controlled opponents are erratic at best, sometimes smashing into walls, and the automatic gearbox programming is dimwitted.
Hope springs eternal
There is plenty to appeal here, but you must dig deep and commit to the long haul. If you are interested, try not to quit after the first two hours and wait to be rewarded.
Which in many ways is what the Test Drive Unlimited series has always done best. The slow reveal, the hard work, the reward.
Solar Crown is set to expand and improve in the years to come. Whether or not a loyal community is formed to bring the streets to life is critical and Traxion will keep tabs on its progress.
As it stands today, however, there are rough edges that need filing down.
| Developer | KT Racing (published by Nacon) |
| Release date | 12th September 2024 (early access from 5th September) |
| Available platforms | PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S |
| Version/s tested | PS5 and PC |
| Best played with | Gamepad |
Full disclosure: A game code was provided by the developers for review purposes. Here is our review policy.
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