Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is a dream game, but can it become a reality?

The presentation for Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is spectacular. It is a car game, not just a racing game. Of course, you drive around the map to get where you want to go and participate in races to achieve your goals, but that is just an extension of the game's excitement for cars. Burnout is about high-speed racing and colliding with opponents, Need for Speed is about underground culture, Forza is about accumulating every existing car collection, Gran Turismo is about precision. And Test Drive, in its purest form, is about cars. I hope the rest of the world shares the developers' vision.

Don't expect to have a fully equipped garage in Test Drive. The game aims to simulate the love for cars as authentically as possible, which means treating them not as disposable toys but as luxury goods. When you visit a car dealership, you don't simply choose from a list of cars based on their statistics; instead, you actually walk through the showroom itself. You can inspect the interior, inquire about customization options, and even take it for a brief test drive (aha, now I get it!) before making a decision. The game emphasizes the social aspect, with a home you can redecorate, new outfits to purchase, radio stations to browse, and everything that creates the feeling of being in a vibrant world.

It feels great to drive around in the island city of Test Drive, and the additional bonuses for performing certain maneuvers, although nothing new in racing games, contribute to the idea that you are working towards something greater. The handling itself was slightly less forgiving than I would have liked, but for a game that takes cars so seriously, it makes sense that it doesn't allow arcade-style drifting through corners.

Everything sounds great, and I've been enjoying my time with it, but something has been nagging at the back of my mind. Throughout, as I listened to the developers and raced through the city, I couldn't shake the feeling that it felt like Riders Republic. Both Test Drive Solar Unlimited and Ubisoft's extreme sports title heavily rely on online play, not just as a means of competition, but also as the foundation of the player experience. When the audience isn't there, the foundation crumbles and sinks.

We are told that every race in Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown will be an online race. If there aren't enough drivers available (which unfortunately, in my opinion, will be the case on a huge map), you will compete against bots, which takes away from the liveliness of it all. Since the development team obviously recognizes that this may be necessary, wouldn't it have been better to use active NPCs who have their own story and personality, supporting the vision of a vibrant world, instead of relying on online players to fulfill that role?

Another mentioned feature makes sense on paper but feels actively discouraging in practice. To balance out skill level differences, some players are told that a fifth-place finish counts as a victory for them. I understand this design - if there are four players whom you will never be able to beat, having an achievable goal provides the opportunity for your progress not to hit a wall because someone with 1,000 hours of gameplay mocks it and keeps repeating beginner races. But the appeal of racing games is winning the race - nobody wants to hold a good, clean line and secure a respectable position in the middle of the pack.

That's the problem with these always-online games - they need a casual audience to reach critical mass, but casual players won't stick around to get beaten. You can't create a world of aspirations where you move through the city to a penthouse apartment and upgrade from a junk car to a supercar based on the fantasy of finishing fifth in every race. No matter what game it is, online play will always be dominated by a small elite, and a small elite cannot sustain a social world. The two sides of world-building in Solar Crown are like gasoline in a diesel engine. It simply won't work.

I would love to be proven wrong. I enjoyed my time with the game, it looked great, and there was a lot of passion behind creating a very specific type of racing game. However, the excessive reliance on an online community that needs to respond in droves is the game's Achilles' heel, and "we need more players" quickly becomes an unsolvable problem. Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown will be released next year, and I hope that by then, there will be a robust single-player option that allows me to indulge in my fantasies of buying a supercar in peace, without having to rely solely on beating the worst bot and calling it a victory.