Initial Drift Online is a drift racing game developed by the independent developer Rewind App. I bought it for around 0,5€ during the steam spring sale, the normal price is around 5€. It’s still in early access.
Beautiful sunsets on the touge – Game appearance
The graphics are quite realistic but nothing comparable to game like Forza Horizon 5. The textures are well made and buildings don’t feel repetitive. There are some flat walls with just an image on them which feels a bit out of place. Sometimes you can see through walls when you crash and at some places there are really small holes in objects.
The cars look realistic and especially the lighting by the brake and indicator lights look very nice.
Another well executed thing is the day and night cycle: while you’re drifting up and down the mountain roads the light situation changes and you’ll have to turn on your lights to see.
You can choose between third person, first person and a cinematic perspective. Sadly if you’re playing in third person there is no driver model sitting in the car.
Up and Down and Up and Down and … – Gameplay experience
The basis repetitive gameplay idea consists of driving up and down 4 different mountain roads on 4 different maps. You are a tofu delivery driver and need to get tofu from point A to B as fast as possible. By completing deliveries you earn money. The amount of money that you receive is very small (it took me around 1h to get another car for 1k) so you’ll have to spend some time grinding the deliveries if you want a nicer looking more expensive car.
If you meet other players you can race against them. The race just takes you downhill on the map you are currently on. Other player could drive on the same road but can’t bump into you or your opponent.
The roads themself have a nice layout and some of them are based on real roads. Sadly there are only mountain roads at the moment and the city street sections are quite small. When you want to travel to a different map you first need to find the travel point to that map inside another map. This and the fact that some maps have buildings like the garage or the car dealer and others don’t is quite annoying. Another thing that is confusing is the yellow barriers at intersections: the map continues there but you can’t go there because the maps ends. Invisible walls are also placed over some greenery sections that at first seem fine to drive over.
Drifting in Initial Drift Online is way harder than for example in Drift86 where the car just goes sideways no matter what you do. Here you have to pull your handbrake to start a drift and with lots of luck and practice you can get a clean drift using nitro. Nitro just gives your car a power boost and can be helpful to get speeds out of corners. This works well until you get to the maps with lots of hairpin corners where I for example misjudge the distance at which I need to start braking a lot.
If you crashed (which happens a lot before you get to know the controls) you can reset your car with the R key or the game does it for you. Sometimes you get put on the track facing the wrong way which is annoying if you continue driving in that direction without remembering which direction you initially wanted to go.
New cars and liveries can be purchased at the car dealer and there are 22 of them when publishing this review. They are well designed and can be upgraded in performance categories at the garage. You can customize your car appearance like the headlight and underbody lighting, the color of you car and your spoiler at other tuning shop around the different maps.
Do X Y times – Grind
While just drifting around is quite fun in the game the achievements themself are hard to earn. There are 36 of them and 4 of them require you to travel up and down the mountain for each map. Others like the 100 driving time or earning 100k are the same. As I mentioned above this feels unnecessary and just takes way too long for the casual gamer to complete.
Conclusion
| Summarized Review | ||
|---|---|---|
| Player: Nik, Playtime: 3h, Score out of 100: 55 | ||
| criteria | X/10 | comment |
| Graphics | 7 | |
| Audio | 4 | not my music type |
| Hardware | 9 | low end |
| Gameplay | 5 | way too repetitive but quite fun |
| Story | 2 | tofu delivery driver… |
| Difficulty | 6 | quite hard to learn and harder to master |
| Grind | 8 | just for achievements |
| Audience | 5 | aimed only at drift lovers |
| Bugs/ Support |
9 | only graphical |
| Price | 10 | on sale very nice |
Initial Drift Online: I would recommend you buying this game when its on sale for 0,5€ if you like drifting on narrow mountain roads. It takes some time to get used to the drifting mechanics but the game definitely is worth it on sale. Keep in mind that the gameplay at this point and time is way to repetitive after some time. But who knows it might get better when the final version releases. – GLPC: emk
