Need for Speed multiplied by GTA Online. That sounds brilliant, right? 

Unfortunately, while Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown has great ambitions, it’s let down by the execution of… well, almost everything.

The idea is solid. It’s an open world racer - and frankly there aren’t nearly enough good open world racers left going these days - merged with a ‘millionaire’s playground’ aesthetic and an  always-online MMO with some simulation elements thrown in.

The open world racer part is decent enough. The game is set in a fictionalised Hong Kong, complete with races scattered across the map, some clustered neon city streets, some long motorway bridges and some windy country roads. It’s an open world racer. Check.

Then there’s the GTA online-y/MMO sim bits many of which Test Drive Unlimited first pioneered 20 years ago.

Here, you start off in your hotel room - a bland and so far, un-customisable beige room - connected to a foyer with some supercars parked in it.

There’s really not much to do other than run outside and hop in your car. Other points on the map work in a similar way - you don’t buy cars on menus, you drive to one of several dealerships like Ferrari or Lamborghini, park up outside and walk around the building to pick one.

Then, you don’t tune it in a menu, you drive to a garage, park there and go inside to upgrade its parts. The only concession to convenience is that you can fast travel between petrol stations once you unlock them, pinging around the (fairly small) map instead of having to trek from one side to the other just to get a slightly bigger exhaust. 

The narrative (I use the term loosely) driving you forwards is a very basic premise with a woefully uninspired script. You can choose to race for one of two clans: the posh Sharps or the upstart Streets. Every race from then on earns you clan rep, which you can use to open more races and get more credits - and when racing online you can team up with others in your clan and race in groups to represent for one side or the other. 

The sim elements extend to the racing itself, but it's not really clear why. It drives like an arcade game, but you can press the L1 button and pull up a menu which allows you to do everything from turn the windscreen wipers on to flash your indicators a bit like Farm Simulator or Bus Simulator. But… it’s not really clear why you need to do any of that.

The driving is actually well done. The team behind Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is Kylotonn, who if you’re a deep racing game fan you might know from the cult hit WRC games before EA took over. Their WRC Generations title may not be the prettiest game ever made, but it was a genuinely decent love letter to rallying with a fun yet realistic handling model.

And that handling model made its way here, complete with its characteristic snap oversteer. Whether you’re on a controller or a wheel, its handling actually feels really good. On PS5, the controller makes good use of the haptics, with the trigger locking up if you take a corner too sharply and the brakes seize up, while the handling allows you to throw it around aggressively with just a bit of drift. On a wheel, it’s pinpoint accurate without being too over or understeer-y. You can adjust the assist settings: all on and it’s very forgiving, turn them all off and it feels like you’d need a £1,000 racing rig just to keep it in a straight line.

Unfortunately, the races themselves don’t have this level of customisation. Unlike say, Forza Horizon, you can’t adjust the difficulty of each race on the fly, so some races are cakewalk easy, some are rage inducing with rubber band AI who will ram you off the racing line into a tree/building. And you can’t restart a race - you can’t even PAUSE a race - because the whole thing is always-online and designed as if you’re online, even when you’re in single player.

And it’s ugly. Frighteningly ugly. I actually had to check I hadn’t downloaded the PS4 version by mistake. There must be some grave issues that need to be patched out because it looks terrible and still drops frames all over the place. The performance mode is barely managing 1080p (forget 4K) and the graphics mode is full of weird glitches and terrible slowdown. The graphics menu does nothing - enabling and disabling HDR makes no difference, for example. 

It’s so bad that I wonder if they shipped the beta version by mistake, but as of launch day there’s still no patch for PS5, so this really might be ‘it’. It’s one of the ugliest games I’ve played in a long time. PS5 Pro AI upscaling might be needed for this one.

The online/MMO elements don’t add much either. You can challenge other players when you see them, but there’s not much in this world worth climbing the ladder for. You can get new clothes and you can buy new car parts, tint your windows and add liveries, but you can’t customise your base, buy big swanky houses or visit casinos to gamble with friends like a true millionaire at play. That’s promised in an update in future, which is why there’s an oddly strict 18 rating on the box (gambling). 

There’s potential here. It could be a great, racing-focused online open world meets playboy simulator, but the overworld, the racing, the online and RPG elements are all sorely lacking as of right now. If it wasn’t for the handling model there’d be little to recommend at all.

You can’t rate a game on what it might become - the devs promise a whole extra map, more social features, more cars (there’s only 100 here), and hopefully graphics updates on console, but right now this trails miles behind Forza Horizon (any of them), Need For Speed Unbound, The Crew Motorfest, hell even Burnout Paradise, so it’s impossible to recommend to all but the most ardent racing fans who’ve run out of road on any other game - and until then, Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown needs a lot of tuning to catch up to the pack.

Buy Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown for PS5 for £42.50 instead of £49.99 by using this Currys PSN card tip to get 15% off the price of any game on the PlayStation store. 

Alternatively you can buy a boxed copy with disc for £42.95 from Amazon UK for PS5 or Xbox Series X.