Recent reviews by nigeldoyle3dkiwi

After a month playing (106 hours) I've reached the maximum level 60. So have a good handle on this game. I've also played Test Drive Unlimited 2 in the past and are a long time Horizon player having played all 5 versions. Recently I've started playing The Crew Motorfest.

This is a game I was so looking forward to. Sadly and after the first patch it's not in a state fit for release. Essentially the game isn't finished and is very rough around the edges.

Pros:
The map is great
Visually looks very good (on a high end graphics card). But not up to the same standard as Horizon 5 or Crew Motorfest
Handling on AWD drive cars is very good and similar to Horizon 5. There seems to be a driving assist so that on most corners once you're part way into the corner you can give it full gas and full steering lock, you then power around the corner holding your line.

Cons:
Always online. No offline mode. Made worse by unreliable servers

No crossplay for platform or region. Most of the time you're playing by your yourself. Essentially to get anyone to race against you have to invite them from the group menu (if there's anyone there) to join a group. You then join a race and those in your group get a race invite.

No pause or rewind. Even if you're just racing the AI you can't pause a race.

The AI is dreadful and there's no difficulty slider. The game has 4 levels of adaptive difficulty so if you win a race it ramps up. Problem is, even on the lowest difficulty the AI is very aggressive and will barge you out of the way. Then the AI cars will pass you even if your car is going full speed. To do some of the in game tasks I've had to lose the same race over and over again to get the difficulty down to amateur and then only just won the race. Contrast this Horizon 5 and Crew Motorfest that have difficulty sliders and both I play at high difficulty as the lower levels are easy to beat.

Then still on the AI. If it rains (and it rains a lot) the AI crash all the time as they drive too fast. So when it rains it's very easy to beat the AI no matter the level.

While street racing is a lot of fun the offroad races are mostly on single track roads so passing is difficult. Then some corners are very tight and the cars have trouble cornering. You have to handbrake slide these to get around.

Graphics aren't optimized and performance is nowhere near as good as other open world games. You need a RTX 3070 or higher to get reasonable performance. While the game will run on lesser hardware it really struggles and looks awful.

Lots of graphics glitches e.g. weird reflections or flashing. Plus the game will regularly micro pause will can result in crashing off the road if you were going around a corner.

Character animation is awful. In fact the earlier TDU games had better character animation.

Lacking many of the things that make up a TDU game. No mini missions, no houses, no photo missions, missing some event types that TDU 2 had, no event championships. No casino but that is coming. Ironically The Crew Motorfest feels more like a Test Drive game than Solar Crown does.

Game feels lifeless. After playing Crew Motorfest you appreciate how much more polished that game is than Solar Crown. And as mentioned Crew Motorfest feels more like a Test Drive game than Solar Crown does. Heck, the Crew Motorfest even has a similar Hawaii map that TDU 2 had.

Solar Pass rewards are a joke. Apart from a free car at the end many of the rewards are stickers or colour variations of things like sunglasses. A weekly or monthly playlist system like Crew Motorfest and Horizon 5 would be much better.

Clan system is boring and very grindy to level up.

Not a lot of point playing the game once you reach level 60. Don't know why the levels don't keep on going like Horizon 5.

Developers vision of the game seems to be way different than what the player base wants. Communication from the developers is patchy. Sometimes its good other times it's terrible. For example Season 1 Solar Pass kicked off and many people couldn't get it. The solution was to keep restarting the game until it worked. It took the developers about 6 days to acknowledge there was a problem. Then when they announced they were going to fix it and the servers would be offline, an hour later they came back to say the maintenance would be delayed as they had found a problem.

Do the developers play their own game? Some of the bugs seem so obvious you wonder if the developers play their own game.

Summary:
A game that doesn't live up to its predecessors. Although there is a roadmap to add in some of the missing things and improve the game I'm not sure it can fix things.

For a budget game it's pretty good. I'm just playing it while I wait for Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown to come out.

Driving physics are very arcady and similar to Need for Speed. I actually like it better than Need for speed as you don't have the stupid visual effects and the wacky burst NOS. But it's a grind to earn money to upgrade your car.

No issues with game performance for me. Runs great.

Lovin' it. But wish I had watched a few You Tube videos first by HokiHoshi and Malitia Gaming first. These explained a lot of things. Now that I understand the game a lot better and now have a decent car I'm really enjoying the game. I was struggling driving an A class Crown Vittoria. Now I'm in a Lotus Exige I'm winning most of the time now (in relaxed mode).

With 20 hours of play I haven't had a single crash. Game seems to run nice and fast on decent hardware.

But I wish there was an option to turn off the cartoon graphics. That said the light trails from the rear lights are very cool and add a sense of speed to the game.

I'm not having the issues that some others have experienced. After playing 73 hours so far the game has only crashed a couple of times. I'm playing on a new gaming PC with RTX 3070 GPU. I'm also not experiencing the frame rate drops as some others have experienced. That said if I play the game on my gaming laptop with RTX 2070 GPU I do get the frame rate drop. Part of the problem I suspect is the game is constantly auto saving and if your internet connection is a bit slow it makes the game stutter.

I also played Dakar 18 and much prefer Dakar Desert Rally and I'm really enjoying it. One thing you learn early on is not to trust the navigator. He'll often say "keep" left when in fact you should keep right. You need to be constant keeping an eye on the roadbook. Hopefully this is something that will get addressed in a patch.

The other annoying thing in simulation mode is the 170 km/h speed limit. It's very easy to exceed this and receive a time penalty. My solution is to lower the tyre pressures and drive in manual mode and don't go into top gear. There really needs to be a speed limiter built in. This would make simulation mode much more enjoyable.

Still, it's a great game. Probably not one if you like short races.

Online racing is a bit of a demolition derby as you're usually up against AI drivers. Seems very few people play online.

My main game is Horizon 5 but that's getting a bit boring after 6 months while we wait on the first expansion. To liven things up I bought Burnout Paradise remastered and Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered. I don't really like Hot Pursuit and find many of the races / tasks too hard. However I'm loving Burnout Paradise remastered so far and much more within my skill level.

I'm not having the issues others have mentioned. No crashes so far. Running a Gaming Laptop with RTX 2070 GPU.