Why Drift86 is one of the best drift games

Drift86 is a drift/racing game developed by the independent developer RewindApp who has made similar titles in the past. My friend and I both bought the game on sale for around 1€, the normal price is around 2€.
A little disclaimer to start with: if you don’t like drifting in a racing game this isn’t the game for you. After steering only a little bit you find yourself sliding with your car.

Game appearance

The graphics are designed as a mixture of both low poly environmental objects and a basic shapes with flat textures. The car models are way more advanced than the environment since while drifting the only thing noticeable is the car and the music.

Speaking of music and sounds: The game has a variety of songs from the euro beat genre which feel very similar to the initial d soundtrack. It’s possible to change the ingame music to your own by putting your music files into a folder in the game directory. In addition to that while drifting you get the classic tire squeaking sound effect.

What you do in Drift86

The basic gameplay consists of choosing a map and a car to drive and just getting the highest drift score while not crashing. To do this you have the control over throttle, brake and handbrake either with a keyboard or a controller. If you can hold a drift in one direction for a certain time you get extra points on a combo meter. This helps you multiplies your drift points and helps you achieve higher drift scores.

Also you need to pay attention to your environment since you loose all your current drift score when crashing. This can be quite hard at the beginning but you will get used to this within the first 10 minutes of playing. Map knowledge is the key to success here as you need some trial rounds on a map to get to know when to brake and when to start drifting.

Game content

The maps are really diverse but the ground you drift one most of the time is asphalt although there are some dirt track maps. There are maps where you need to drive multiple rounds and others where just one is enough.

If you look into your garage you can find a big variety of cars to drive around. They also all have a slightly different handling. Certain cars are better at certain maps and that makes you feel like the car isn’t powerful enough to take corners on a map or that is hasn’t enough grip to stay on the track. My favorites so far are (from left to right):
The “Imprezo” for dirt tracks, the “910E” for all the track maps and the “Mako” for the mountain maps.

Playing multiplayer is possible on either the official servers which are open to everyone or by creating a custom server yourself. This works well but the custom server can only be accessed over the ingame menu and you sadly aren’t able to invite friends over the steam chat function.

Something to criticize?

Bugs in general aren’t a big problem in Drift86 as we haven’t encountered any major ones. The only slightly annoying thing is that when driving “off-road” one can easily glitch under the map. Another thing we noticed are some weird graphic bugs that occur on low quality settings. Although they don’t destroy the game experience the sky sometimes looks a bit weird. Also when starting the game once and driving multiple cars you haven’t driven before only the first car will count towards Steam achievements. For general help with the game or specific questions I recommend checking out their official discord server.

Talking about price: 2€ for the infinite amount of fun you can have with this game is really nice. The map and car dlcs both only cost 2€ as well and are definitely worth the content while also supporting the developer who still updates the game with new cars and skins.

Summary

Get Drift86 here:

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