Demo Day 1 Impressions - Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown

The Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown demo came out as a surprise today. I’ve played it for around 3 hours. The game is really fun but parts of it became unplayable after a while.

The good:
• Sound design – the cars sound alive, with pops and bangs everywhere!
• Physics – the cars feel like they have a solid amount of weight behind them.
• I’ve encountered more players cruising around this game than I have with Need for Speed or Crew Motorfest. I’ve almost always had 1 or 2 players join my races.

The bad:
• The game breaks at certain points, causing races to become problematic and frustrating.
• Some minor errors – such as intro cutscene starting while the loading screen is still going.
• Not really optimized yet – it has high requirements but the graphics are not as great.
• Customization includes only paint, rims, interior, window tint and livery editor. For some that will be quite enough, for others it may even be a dealbreaker

Verdict – would I give this game a chance at release? Absolutely. It feels like a passion project, it feels like a lot of love is going into it. It however (based on the demo) does not feel like a full AAA game, which is perfectly fine.

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All the footage recorded by me.

All of the music in the video is from outside of the game.

Music used:
Streambeats – Burnt Toaster
Streambeats – French Pastries
Super Mario – Bowser’s Fury
Super Mario – Bowser’s Super Eternal Fury