Absolute Drift Review – HTG
Absolute drift is a game for the PC and PlayStation 4 about, you guessed it, drifting a car. Sounds fun right? Well for the most part it is. It is a very simple, user friendly control system that allows even the basic gamer the ability to drive and drift.
Story
The story or free roam, as it goes by in the game, is fairly simple. There are different worlds that all have different amount and kinds of challenges to accomplish in order to move on to the next world and repeat the process. Completing a world and moving on to the next also unlocks new cars, which tend to handle a little better than the original car you start with. There isn’t much of an actual story though. You are visited by a Buda looking figure at the very start of free roam who explains what drifting is and how it came about according to the developer. Really this is nothing more than just that, an opening moment. I made it to world 5 in about 90 minutes and never again has anything popped up regarding the story line. This game is a game for drifting so it really doesn’t need any explanation so the Buda part just felt weird and forced into the game.
Graphics
This game does look very clean and runs for the most part smoothly. There is a little bit of color to highlight challenges or advertisements that are in the game but other than that it is all white or gray. The word for this game is simplistic and it holds true to that word throughout the design and graphics as well. Making things too loud or over the top with color would have just made it look cluttered and disorganized instead of adding to it. In this case the simple approach was the right approach and it’s nice that the developers thought this through completely.
Audio
The soundtrack for this game was this games biggest highlight and thing that stood out the most. You have the ability to change the music by hitting the TAB key, so that you can find that perfect song to drive/drift to. The music choices are all upbeat and techno sounding. Very similar to the style of music in Rocket League. Only a limited amount of actual songs though, between 5-10. If they were to add more songs, it would only improve on this area as it wouldn’t be so repetitive.
Gameplay
This is the area that the game under performed and became frustrating, completely frustrating. First off the controls. You have the ability to hook up an Xbox One or PS4 controller to your computer, which would strongly benefit your experience. Using just the arrow keys made it difficult and added to the frustration. For the first 45 minutes there was more spinning out than drifting for me. The game gives you a handbrake but it is not even needed, except for certain challenges. The moment you are at a certain speed and you try to turn, you are drifting instantly and more than likely out of control. It is very tough to feather the gas and turn. It feels as if there are only 2 speeds, full throttle or barely moving. Eventually I was able to get used to it for the most part but I still found myself spinning out when I was just simply driving to the next challenge or destination. Now for the worlds themselves. They all include a different medley of challenges to be complete. From jumping, donuts, spinning in an area, drifting around and between things, and 5 collectible red X’s. To reach the next area which unlocks more tracks and cars, you need to complete every one of these challenges. This was enjoyable and fun at first but by the 5th world it was boring and repetitive. Now you might say well why not do the races or events you unlocked? I did do a few at the start to see what they were about but it was more of the same. You had specific challenges to do for you to “complete” the race or event. They involved, multiplier, overall score, and some kind of unique challenge for the course itself. Again just more of the same. This just added to the repetitiveness and wasn’t enough to draw me in to play the different tracks after playing the first few that were available.
Conclusion and Rating
Overall the game was fun at the start but easily lost its thrill as the repetitiveness of the challenges took the enjoyment out. Add that with the controls being extremely touchy and it makes for a frustrating game to play. I will say this, if you enjoy racing or drifting games then you may enjoy this, I just did not. My rating of this game would be a 2.5/5 with the Audio and Graphics pulling most of the weight for that score. There would need to be drastic improvements to the handling of the car and even then I doubt I will ever pick this game up again.
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