It seems odd, perhaps even unfair, to begin a review of a game grumbling about its technically wobbly launch. After all, the server issues that Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown has suffered with in its ‘Gold Edition’ early access period are hopefully fleeting in the context of the lifespan of the game, and nobody complains about the fact that it took Michelangelo a little longer than expected to get the Sistine Chapel right, right?
The problem is that not mentioning it in the bit of the review you read before getting distracted by something on the sidebar would underplay just how spectacularly badly it’s all gone. Even with only the relatively modest population of Gold Edition purchasers, the servers crumbled faster than a dunked Digestive. Often, you’d be held at the login screen, unable to start the game at all. If you were lucky enough to hit the tarmac on Hong Kong island, you might still be unable to start a race, even against AI-controlled opposition, because of a mandatory check in with the servers before every event. Worse still, you might actually finish a race and still lose that progress as the game pings the server again before the results screen. I found myself having to play the game exclusively between the hours of six and nine in the morning to ensure a reliable connection, squinting at apexes through bleary, tired eyes. And, just to reiterate, this all occurred before the floods of new players arrived on the game’s official launch day.
The other reason it bears mentioning early on in this review is that, even though the always-online service has become slightly more stable, it feels instinctively unnecessary. The game is perfectly capable of populating its races with AI cars rather than its preference of seamlessly adding other real world players, so why make the check for those players mandatory? What’s more, unlike many games, including genre stable-mate The Crew, Test Drive Unlimited isn’t hell bent on getting you to spend real money to top up your in-game balance, so it’s not like there’s a delicate real-to-pretend economy to doggedly police via a constant online connection. The lack of microtransactions should be something to be celebrated, but we’ve inherited a good chunk of the inconvenience that usually accompanies them. In fact the most damning thing is the existence of the original Test Drive Unlimited, which managed to handle the blend of online and online play far more elegantly nearly two decades ago in 2006.
