Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Open world racing games of the last decade have become inextricably linked with slot machines, making it feel like each race, level-up and achievement gleefully spits out a new car for you to deposit at the back of your garage and ignore once that fleeting dopamine high has disappeared. If other open-world racers have players sat on stools amidst rows of one-arm bandits, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown wants to take you back to the more refined and exclusive blackjack tables where you have to earn what you win.

That’s the key defining factor between Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown and a Forza Horizon or The Crew. Your car collection is intentionally constrained, you’re pushed to spend more time with your starter car and slowly upgrade it to be more and more competitive in the early races, working your way up to be able to afford something in the next category. Hypercars are aspirational prizes here that you won’t have until much, much later in the game.

Built around the impossible invitational road racing competition of the Solar Crown – so powerful and lucrative that it can clear the Hong Kong streets for its sanctioned races, and can hand you an AI-powered contact lens as you step out of the quadcopter – you aim to gradually build up your car collection, and to work your way up through the ranks of one of the two racing clans: the Streets and the Sharps.

It’s an appealing conceit for those who pine for games of yesteryear, though the actual gameplay loop will still feel very familiar. The fundamentals are still to head out into the open world and take on the limited selection of races and time trials that have been doled out to you, blaze through high-speed traps, and that’s pretty much it. There is a race variant called Domination, which is all about earning points for your positioning as you pass each checkpoint, but it doesn’t really lead to more topsy turvy races.

Racing is generally fun, and some events can be really rather challenging and rewarding if you’re