Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown review: promising racer plagued with tech issues

If you're not familiar with the Test Drive Unlimited series, which hasn't had a new entry in 13 years, you might be unaware that it essentially pioneered the open-world online racing genre now dominated by Forza Horizon and The Crew.

The ingredients are right for the new game. Solar Crown, which is out now on Xbox, PlayStation and PC, is set in a roughly one-to-one scale Hong Kong, which turns out to be the perfect setting for an open-world racer. The combination of tight, detailed city streets, winding mountain passes and off-road trails offers plenty of variety, and every corner of the map feels hand-crafted.

It's just a shame the graphics engine can't keep up; on consoles in particular this looks like a game from a decade ago. You have the option of a performance mode that features compromised visual fidelity or a quality mode that serves up an unacceptably choppy experience.

Handling-wise it's a strange fish too. Braking for corners generates massive understeer, but lifting off for faster turns instead transforms it into pleasing, controllable oversteer. It's probably tuned to help casual players carve through traffic and, while you'll soon get your eye in, it's not as satisfying as Forza Horizon's driving model, which is as expertly balanced as a mountain goat.

While we're making comparisons with Forza, prospective players of Solar Crown will have to steel themselves for more gradual progress through the game. While Horizon is happy to shower you with gift cars, Solar Crown's approach is to keep you in individual vehicles for longer and force a more meaningful feeling of ownership by, you've guessed it, making them all extremely expensive. In a way, we respect the attempt to generate a real sense of connection to each car in your garage, but on the other hand we want to drive a Ferrari F40, please.

The main problem, though, is that everything in this game, from entering the open world to starting a race requires a solid connection to online servers that have been – during the early access period, with only a handful of players – flakier than the carpets at an eczema convention. The most infuriating thing is that this online requirement appears to be completely unnecessary: while the game will try and find you human opposition for your races, it can happily rustle up a grid of computer-controlled drivers and there's no real-money-to-pretend-money economy to keep locked down.

The server issues will almost certainly be ironed out over time, and while there's been some initial scrambling to fix the problem, we're anticipating more difficulties around the game's full launch when a greater number of players are dumped into the mix. When the dust settles what's left will be a relatively unexceptional online racing game blessed with an exceptional world to play in.

In time, we could see Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown becoming something of a cult classic, particularly if players embrace the Hong Kong map as a place to socialise online. For now, though, it's Test Drive Very Limited Indeed...