Listen to me: Don't do it.
I know what you are thinking, "I've seen the reviews, and the videos, I don't care, the game is on sale, I will adjust my expectations, I just want a Forza-like game in a city environment with lots of highways". It's not worth it.

Leaving aside the fact that it's always online, that you can't play solo if you want, that you can't pause races nor rewind (and that restarting takes about a full minute of random menus to go through), and that both the AI and in-game economy are setup to make this whole thing as un-fun as humanly possible, it's just not good man. It doesn't have the sauce.

You deserve better.

On my system I can play both Forza Horizon 5 and The Crew Motorfest at max settings, 4K resolution (without upscaling) and both games remain stuck at 60 FPS no matter what.
Meanwhile, TDU Solar Crown looks like a mobile game, runs mostly at 45 FPS regardless of settings and looks outright broken.
It's the end of the year 2024, and this game can't pull off realtime reflections. Instead you get these weird, lowres screenshots of the environment that get slapped to your car every 100 meters or so and absolutely never match the environment. You'll see the ground from a few streets back proyected on your car's roof, you'll see the sky reflected when in tunnels, it's incredibly broken.

The driving is fine, more arcadey than Forza but there's a solid based there. Vehicles feel dangerous at fast speeds, and drifting is smooth and highly controlable. Those are all of the positives.
The map is also not bad, I like that there are hidden roads to explore, definitely some good attention to detail, you can't deny they tried. I went by a laundry and the interior is modeled in 3D and has animated laundry machines! They are lowres and lowpoly, but they are cute, they really tried! But everything else is so broken that you can't ever really appreciate the good.
Once in a while all of the stars align and the game actually looks quite good for a second, and then it's back to broken lighting again.

Sound is another wierd one. The cars sound great, and that's it. The rest of the city is completely dead. There's no environment audio, no pedestrians, nothing. It's a zombie town.

I re-installed the Crew (Motorfest) and turns out they've added a new island for free! Playing that game after TDU felt like going in a trip to the future, the difference is brutal.
I'm not actually promoting The Crew, or Forza, but if you are here reading this review chances are you own either of those games or they are in your wishlist. Get those instead. You deserve better.

There's nothing in this game that works properly. This simply ain't it champ.
Move along.

so first of all, yes I did get a refund, here is why

1. no solo play
2. plays nothing like the original TDU games
3. AI racers
4. Trash loading

overall I'd say this is antoher one of those "oh it's not quite finished, let's go ahead and release it anyway, we'll fix it later!"

this game sucks, somehow 100x worse than the original test drive unlimited from 18 years ago boooo nacon booooo

Based on the state of the game as of 11/25/2024. I have a deep understanding of the game and its mechanics so I can tell you exactly why this an objectively- not subjectively, objectively- badly designed game- and in theory it wouldn't take much to fix it- given time. Perhaps to your surprise I'm also not going to call it a bad game. Many of my subjective takes on why the game is bad have little to do with the countless specific gripes (often understandable, TDU2 was a very specific thing for people) various TDU2 devotees have placed it on a sadly understandably lofty pedestal to achieve. Most of them aren't even adjacent, in fact, so if you're interested read on.

The OBJECTIVE reasons this game is bad:
-AI: THE biggest objective reason why this game is badly designed is the way the AI fundamentally works. Even if they added all the Forza Horizon-esque features people seem to want out of this game, you will always be facing AI at some point, no matter how many are playing the game. So your AI needs to be beatable. Sane. You can argue particulars on that but the AI is neither of those things. They have taken measures to make it better since launch, but the AI is currently very, very good in MOST measures at being a good opponent- except the one that matters most- pacing. If an AI car gets in front of you, it will apply what appears to be a multiplier to what it is allowed to do compared to the upper limits of a human driver, up to a factor of 2. It's a crude way to describe it but it's as far as I'm concerned the most apt way. The AI, especially over longer races, will get better and better at its job, and that multiplier is only infunced in your immediate vicinity where you see it otherwise. This is absurd, objectively bad design, and needs to be fixed as soon as humanly possible. This is not speculation so much as it is observation paired with literal interviews, by the way, they have literally admitted the AI is capable of twice those limits in interviews. This applies to all races, without exception all the way up to and including Crown Jewel Ruby, a 69.7 mile race takes over 39 minutes to complete under the most ideal human circumstances- the AI will frequently run it as low as 32.

-Race rewards: Giving the exact same amount for every single race, regardless of length/difficulty, is an bad design choice, objectively, for any purpose you would use it for in a racing game. Every race starts with a base of 15000 payout, which, sans first time bonus, will net you between 10000 and 27000 extra. Once you have done everything, this is what you're left with. It's absurd and given they bill this as something they're effectively building into a racing MORPG (there's no massive, it's instanced), you need varied rewards to incentivize players to play and compete. The only exceptions to this are the Crown Jewels, which you get at the very end of the game and pay out from 50000 to 22000 (meaning the most you will realistically ever make from a single race is 380000). As if to add insult to injury, doing the race more than once in a day PENALIZES you. You will get diminishing returns for each successive same race you do in a 24 hour period.

The above have been mentioned ad nauseum and I doubt many people will find disagreement that those two factors alone are beyond damning for the game. They need to be fixed before I could in good faith give the game a passing grade.

That being said: Let me opine on the good for a bit, for there is much! Note I never said this was a bad game. In every other respect, it had an audaciously rocky launch (which I observed major fixes to within a few days of the 'early access' week) that has slowly been on the uptick.

-Physics: If you do any amount of research on this game you'll no doubt find blooper clips of cars flying into the sky like a player in Skyrim hit by a troll. Practically gone are those days. They've been running a fine-toothed comb through their map and I seldom find a place where this now occurs. it happens, but it's not going to ruin your race unless you're already driving poorly. Add to that the handling model- which is generally a fine line between arcadey and realistic, but with real-time weather that syncs to the server time and actively influences your car's handling, as well as nuance on road conditions the extends so far as 'it's night, your car will have less traction' and 'that puddle will make you regret turning in to slowly to that corner.' It's no Project Cars, but on the whole it's damned convincing. These are pretty much live 'track' conditions, for all intents and purposes. This is also one of the only open world racing games that actually DOES this, It makes joyriding immensely fun, and fast speeds appropriately dangerous.

-World design- This is, without question, the most complicated map ever recreated on a 1:1 scale. I looked it up for good measure, it is a safe bet to say HKI has far more roads to drive than Forza Horizon 4 and 5 combined. The foliage is constant, lush, incredibly detailed and destructible, no part of the city outside of the hotel feels low-poly, and racing down the road I daresay this looks like one of the most photorealistic racing games on the market, easily. Is it photrealistic in place? Not so much. But you will always feel exactly the sense of speed you should as the ATD rush by.

-Wheel support- With the glaring ommission of proper support for 900-degree steering (I would recommend 360 or 540 at most), this game has excellent and fairly customizable wheel support. It instantly recognized my G920 and H-Shifter and the game works wonderfully with the presets out of the box.

-Sound design: Barring some glitches that have cropped up on occasion, the sound endpoint is among the best I have seen in a racing game. Cars sound closer to Forza than Gran Turismo- they have very natural sounds to them, and while many of them are unified, it all sounds right. Little details like blowoff valves, the game sounding fundamentally different when you put the top down, the various sounds of the city... it's all there to thoroughly immerse you into your time with it.

Now we have to get into the SUBJECTIVELY bad:
-This is a TDU game, but it doesn't feel like one: probably the most common complaint. I would point out TDU1 was drastically different than TDU2, and much of what I've seen people gripe about is planned as future updates. They're very valid gripes. This isn't Drive Club. This isn't Forza Horizon. This game is in the TDU franchise and with that comes an expectation that currently just isn't met- the social features are incredibly lacking to nonexistent outside of races, about the only place you will see other people is in the customization area and rarely the hotel, and there is zero reason to engage with the world around you outside of racing or joyriding. You can indeed test drive a car you don't own, for all of two minutes. But there's no glue keeping the community coming back in that sense, and the events give you meager cosmetic/sticker rewards, never anything meaningful.

-Matchmaking: my gripes here are unlikely to be similar to others'. I have zero problem with facing bots in races so long as they're good. I don't even have a problem with the total lack of playlists, fundamentally. The problem I cannot abide here is that there is no indication outside of a tiny icon that anyone is... *anywhere*. You don't see "insertnamehere" is starting a race, you have x time to join them, which would probably be the easiest fix to the lack of lobbies. Given the excessive need for POI travel, trying to roam in packs often fails, too. Online almost ends up feeling like an afterthought, rather than the core thing. Just the Sharps and the Streets that you can join at level 12 (which allows you to basically gain a guaranteed 50K every day you play if you're a Sharp).

I'd like to opine more... but Steam review character limit. I'd say I got 95% of my point across anyway so.......

It's just bad.
Bad graphics, bad gameplay, bad physics... don't trust screenshots, this game looks like ♥♥♥♥ on Ultra settings

NO!
- AI is cheating, I saw them teleport and make impossible turns
- One mistake and its over, if you spin out its impossible to recover in a short 2 lap race... (Really needs a rewind feature!)
- No difficulty selection, Random AI opponents with have higher lever cars than you, and you can't upgrade.
- Almost no music (when there is, it is way too boring and generic), weak sounds (including the cars) and effects.
- Looks awful, not optimized at all. Anything above Low settings will produce less than 30FPS on my machine (RTX3060, Ryzen5600, 32GB Ram)
- Meh progression system, I dont care story

its just uninspiread, it is just sad :(

Car handling is great tho!

Early server issues were definitely forgivable, but this has been out over a month now and there's still so little content. I'd rather play the original TDU games than this.

Would not recommend at this time for the casual/take it easy players. The only thing it has going for it, is that the car sound is amazingly good compared to other games. Having only online servers is not a good idea and not being able to choose what difficulty the AI cars should be is just bad... this is just a "cheap" copy of Forza Horizon.

So if you are looking for a "live the ultimate life of luxury" this is not it. Look up reviews on YT before you buy...

Just feels like its a driving game from the 90's. Cant get the rear out for a nice drift. No Collision driving.
I remember being a kid and the original TDU blowing me away. I played this for 45 minutes and was seriously bored. Refund requested

I rarely post game reviews, as I'm always in the satisfactory state when trying certain automotive games and never gain any bad experiences throughout the gameplay.

I tried to like this game despite the majority of negative reviews from curator & players. So far, I really liked this game's concept (not a TDU2 player), the map has so much to explore and I guess TDUSC has a product differentiation within other open-world racing games that I like. Not to mention the cars SFX is amazing, followed with a decent graphics.

However, I really wish this game could be optimized as the game is still not enjoyable with my PC specs being equivalent to the recommended specs for this game. Some structures are not rendered properly, game crashes happen too often and I need to lower down my graphics to achieve decent experience in this game. The AI drivers in this game can't be balanced to a certain level an average player could play with and the cars hierarchy are way too quick when we are progressing with our starter car. This ruins my overall experience through these past 2 hours.

I wouldn't recommend this game as I can say this is an unfinished game, with further development I hope the developers are looking forward to. Not refunding this game as I believe a potential for TDUSC to be better in the upcoming time :)