I should probably make it clear right away that I am not a fan of drifting. It seems to me that if there is any fun to be gotten out of this game, it is only going to be found by “hardcore” drift racing fans who want a game where the only thing they do is drift. Drift by themselves, at that, because this game is completely worthless as a multiplayer game. But before I get into that, I’ll try and discuss the good point(s) of this game.
Good point #1: There is a lot of choice and customization when it comes to picking a vehicle. You can choose from a lot of different cars, including actual cars professional drifters use (I’m assuming. They could have just made all of those people up for all I know). Most of the cars have a variety of paint jobs and rim…jobs you can give them, and can be tuned to further customize them to how you want to play the game. This is by far the best aspect of the game, which is a shame since the best part should be the actual “drifting” part. Oh well.
Good point #2 (I guess…): The drifting in this game is supposedly very realistic. It looks realistic to me, but I really couldn’t say for sure. They tell me that drifting is a very hard thing to do, which involves losing control of the vehicle and almost spinning out. If that’s the case, this game is godly at recreating drifting—I didn’t play a single race where I was completely able to control my vehicle at all times. Most of the time I would just spin out of control every time I made a turn. The argument could be made here that I just suck at the game (true), but my point here is that this game is completely geared towards drifting fanboys.
This brings me nicely into my earlier point about this being worthless as a multiplayer game. Since only drift fanboys who want to spend their days tweaking their videogame car and learning the perfect video drift style would be able to really enjoy this game, it’s kind of hard to ensure that you’d be able to play this with friends (I should mention that when I played multiplayer, the screen was so smushed that I couldn’t see enough in front of my car to know when a turn was coming, so I’d inevitably just fly out of the course every time I was supposed to turn). For sure, you can’t just pick it up and play it. You have to spend hours just trying to figure out how to control your vehicle before you can even play the main part of the game. You actually are forced to take part in a 12 part tutorial and pass tests to be granted access to the main game. I like my racing games to be more or less pick up and play games that I can play with my friends and have fun with. With this game I can’t pick up and play it, can’t play it with my friends, and can’t even have fun with. But, again, I don’t care anything about drifting.
There are supposedly different modes in this game, but they really are just poorly disguised versions of the same thing. The main difference between modes is that in some of the modes you’ll be yelled at by obnoxious people who call you stupid and an idiot for not drifting correctly. In the main mode, the “real time commentators” will relentlessly insult you if you aren’t perfect. It’s kind of funny for a minute or two, but then is just annoying. But not too much on that, since I don’t want to list it as a valid difference between modes. The only thing you do in this game is drift. (There is a two player mode where you just race and don’t have to drift, but it’s the same thing as a drifting course without calculating drift points). You drift alone, or with one other vehicle, but that doesn’t really change things. I know there could be arguments made about the differences between modes, but for me the differences really aren’t enough. The game is far too limited for me to get any sort of long term enjoyment out of it.
I don’t want to say I got zero enjoyment out of this game, because that is not exactly the case. I did get a little bit of enjoyment out of it, but not in the way the game designers intended, I don’t think. I tuned my car so that it would spin out of control even easier than it normally does, made sure to play all courses wet (you can choose between wet, dry, and nighttime for courses), and did my best to crash into obstacles and over bumps and things. Unfortunately, only the bumpers of your car will ever fall off, and they do so immediately as you hit something. Your car never becomes scratched or anything, and there is no other visible damage of any kind. This was fun for me not because I like car crashing racing games above all else (even though I do), but because it was just more fun to stop trying to control my near uncontrollable vehicle and just give in to spinning out and crashing all over the place.
The moral of this story is: This game is for drift racing fans who want a realistic drifting game that is designed for single player play and NO ONE ELSE. If you are a drift fan, then by all means give this game a try. I probably would be really into this game if I cared about drifting, or If I knew who any of the people in the unlockable secret drift tip videos were (The secret tip videos are in Japanese, so I don’t know how those tips are supposed to help me), but I don’t. It is really hard to get into a game that takes so much effort just to figure out how to start playing it when you don’t even care about the sport the game is based on. Oh well.
