TDU-SC Demo [My Experience and Demo Review]

[wollom.]

I’ve played hundreds of hours in TDU2 and have also experienced Forza 3, 4, 5, and the latest NFS, The Crew titles among others. This game operates on a smaller budget and is more focused on cars, lifestyle, and driving (not racing). Therefore, it’s not entirely fair to compare it to other mainstream games. Additionally, I understand that this demo represents an older version with some content locked away.

The Good:
- Car Catalogue: The selection is good, and the car models look great.
No Microtransactions at Launch: This is a big plus.
Progression: The grind to progress feels reasonable and fresh. Supercars aren’t handed out every 10 minutes; you admire them, test drive them, and earn them by winning races and challenges.
- World Environment: The buildings give a good city feel with detailed elements like plants, bins, lampposts, and store signs. Some areas like back streets feel empty, but it makes sense for navigational ease. I haven't gone off-road yet!
- Car Customization: Customization options like paint, stickers, and wheels are good. However, I haven’t found options for spoilers, body kits, or bumpers, which might be car-specific or a comparison issue with the likes of Forza and NFS.
- Car Interaction: Features like headlights, wipers, indicators, and convertible tops are classic TDU and great to see returning.
- Dealerships: Interacting with cars, honking the horn, revving the engine, and test-driving before buying are enjoyable.
- AI Difficulty Scaling: The AI is supposed to scale to your level, ensuring you don’t win every race with a massive 20sec lead, I have noticed them get progressively harder and harder during my time in the demo.
- Frim Returns: A nice feature for roaming the open world and travelling between places.
- Wrecks Return: Exciting to see them back, I will be hunting them at launch!
- Photo Mode: A welcome feature, though I don’t personally use it much, I know people that do.
- Exploration: You can drive almost anywhere, not just on roads, including parking areas and open land and dog parks. Some terrain is bumpy and needs smoothing.
Sense of Speed: Speeds are sensible and more realistic compared to other games.
- Fast Traveling: Limited fast traveling is good imo, encouraging driving to races and appreciating the scenery. Currently, you can only fast travel to gas stations and HQs, which are well-distributed.

The Bad:
- Optimization: Obvious out of the way, the game needs optimization before launch. It runs at 30fps on an RTX 3070 Ti/Intel 10700 @ 1080p on low settings with DLSS set to performance. After an hour, it went up to 70ish fps somehow. So I set it at 1440p on medium settings, and it stayed at a playable 55-60fps. I Understand optimization usually improves closer to launch.
- Driving License School: The driving license school from the old TDU is missing and I believe it was a good intro for new players and helped progress the story. It made players feel accomplished and prepared for bigger and faster championships.
- Ghost City Vibe: There’s a lack of NPC cars and pedestrians, creating a ghost city vibe. Also, 90% of visible cars are red taxis. And also when driving half of them disappear as you get close to them.
- AI Issues: AI cars in free roam often crash on their own accord and screech their tyres for no reason. Better pathing is needed imo.
- Orange Arrows in Races: These make it feel heavily arcade-y. Imo, the arrows should be smaller, similar to the parking lane text size. I think the constant glowing line and floating text for parking lanes are not needed.
- Keyboard Controls: The arrow keys and mouse movement don’t allow you to look around; it’s mapped to the num pad, which is odd.
- Handling: Handling of the cars is a mix of sim and arcade. Hitting curbs jolts the car, which can cause spins. Hitting signs and railings slows you down, but you can plow through trees and lamp posts, which is a bit strange and wacky.
- No Houses at Launch: Houses are planned for the future. It would be great to see customizable interiors like furniture walls and floors as well as garage slots like in the old TDU. Customizing the hotels before launching houses could streamline this feature.
- Car Damage: On low/medium settings, car damage looks like a texture applied to the car rather than actual damage like crumpling or dents, this means it does not affect handling. This may be intentional.
- Racing Modes: The game currently only has races, time trials, and a new cool domination mode. There are no speed points, speed trap or elimination racemodes yet.
- Time Trials: Time trials lack a +/- indicator for each checkpoint, making it hard to gauge performance. There’s also no penalty for going off-road or damaging the car, unlike in TDU2.

Other Notes:
- Music: The soundtrack is generic EDM, which is fine I suppose.
- Community Feedback: Spoke to a couple people in the dealerships and the workshop, players seemed positive about the game, but understand the issues.
- Story/Progression: The demo might have cut a lot, the only thing that happened in the demo was joining a clan (streets or sharps). Usually in racing games, there’s an overarching story like defeating a bad guy or winning all the championships.
- Player Models: The models seem a bit dated, but it’s acceptable for a AA game, I did have it on low graphics too. The characters can be customised quite a lot, including clothes, face structure, however I would like to see a few more presets. also choose this at the beginning of the game as everyone is a white blonde woman atm which is funny.
- Instant Challenges: Can see above people heads, but disabled in the demo, so I can’t comment on their mechanics or performance.
- Ambient Music: Places like hotels and dealerships lack ambient music, making them feel eerie.
- Car Upgrades: The upgrade system is primitive, which has both pros and cons. It’s better than The Crew’s grind for component ratings and simpler than NFS’s sometimes overly complex system at times for noobs. The rarity-based system (common, uncommon, rare, legendary or whatever name) is straightforward but lacks depth, like choosing turbos between single, twin turbos, snail, turbocharged.

Bugs:
- Experienced an infinite 'loading saved game' screen when starting the game, but few other bugs after that.
- No game crashes, menu issues, or bad clipping.
- I also see people getting server issues, I haven't encountered a single one.

I’m posting this during maintenance. Either the servers crashed, or they’re actively working on the game and listening to feedback!

Conclusion: This game has potential and could be great at launch or when fully fleshed out post-launch. Despite a rocky demo, I’m hopeful for this game and will wait for the open beta at the end of next month before pre-ordering

Thanks if you are still reading!