Free Demo for Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown Is Now Available via Steam until June 17

Peter_Brosdahl

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A free demo for Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is now available on Steam ahead of its official launch on September 12. The free demo for Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is being offered as part of Steam's Next Fest event featuring hundreds of demos and developer live streams which runs from June 10 - 17. Test Drives fans are getting an earlier sneak peek of the game as its demo went live yesterday but will cease being available when Next Fest ends.

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And is kind of trash not even going to lie. In tried the demo cars. They drive like the old time cars you can kind of steer at theme parks. No thanks. And the graphics are patently from the 90s. Just no. And I was wanting to enjoy this one.
 
I watched the trailer for this after posting since I literaly had about a minute or two before I had to leave the house and yeah, it looked pretty bad. A shame because I too wanted to like. Fairly certain this is DOA and again a shame because it had potential to be something really cool. After watching that trailer I'm not even going to bother downloading this. In regards to checking something new out for free, I feel my time will be better spent with Midnight Suns.
 
Now the Demo clearly states it's early days... but wow... I wouldn't have released the demo in this state. It feels more like an early alpha.
 
Niner51 said:
Wanted me to create an account. Uninstalled right after that
Click to expand...
I entered one of my throw away emails and it didn't even send an email to it. But it lets me play the game anyway. It never asked me to log in after that, I never set a password. Strange.

As for the game, no way this is ready for a September launch. There are too many bugs and functions not working.

The Bad:

  1. The controls menu is non functional, as soon as you navigate away from it, it reverts back to defaults. Despite of this it detects the steering wheel and it even functions in game as an input method, you are just stuck with the default settings.
  2. The free roam traffic appears out of nowhere and disappears in front of you, and there seems to be no more than two types of traffic car. No police either as far as I could tell so far.
  3. The graphics of interiors are definitely early 2010s at best. The cars look good enough to me, the environment is a mixed bag, depending on the TOD and weather it can look awful to pretty good (I've tried to take screenshots but steam's default screen capture didn't work)
  4. Your avatar looks like an androgynous blob. And customization (which only unlocks later) is only for the face (not that it helps that much either, you can barely make your avatar look human, let alone good looking). The female body shape is definitely DEI influenced, looks more trans than woman. And OFC it is not called female, just model 1,2,3,4, etc)
  5. The matchmaking is non functional, it forces you to wait 1 minute for other players, but in the end you race against AI even in the first race which is supposed to be crawling with players given that it's free for all. I Think I've seen two other players in the entire world in an hour. Of course I'd rather the Multiplayer could be turned off completely and play offline but I guess that's too much to hope for.
  6. I always thought setting the game in a left hand drive country is a huge blunder, and I stick to that assassment. Most of the world drives on the right side, this is confusing, and annoying, and I don't want to get used to it. Especially given that the car models you drive in game have the steering wheel on the left.
The good:

  1. They seem to have the right idea about what the game should be. I can see this being good if a few issues are fixed, starting with the non functional controls menu and the awful avatars.
  2. You can play with a steering wheel without any hardship, this already makes it better than any NFS or Forza game that came out in the last two decades.
  3. The physics have a good foundation, the car handles predictably, it is clear that there is a good physics model running here that has been dumbed down to accommodate casuals instead of crap pretending to be real physics a'la The Crew or FM.
Conclusion:

It has potential but I'm not holding out hope that it will materialize as anything good, it will release unfinished, unpolished and go down as a giant flop, which will prevent any similar game from getting greenlit anywhere for at least 10 years. When the issue won't be the concept, but the execution.
 
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