Drift One Review

Drift One pretty much wears its heart on its sleeve with the title. It’s designed to be a drift simulator available on iOS devices and was developed by an individual by the name of Murat Menevse.

Gameplay shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, and that’s that you’ll be drifting around an assortment of tracks, doing what you can to increase your score and gain some cash along the way. There are nine tracks available to you as a player, all with a completely different feel to the last. On top of that, there are also 12 cars for you to unlock, each one having slightly different attributes to the last.

Cash in the game allows you to unlock new cars and tracks throughout the game, with new cars having different stats when compared to the others. You can also use the in-game currency to apply some colours and decal effects to your vehicles, but there’s no way to upgrade your car’s engine. When it comes to cash in the game, it mostly just feels like an element of the game that is shoehorned in, so that you can’t enjoy the entirety of the game from the offset. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have some kind of wall for you to get over as a player, but I feel it would have been better if it was more down to your high score, rather than grinding for cash so you can play the next track.

The game totes itself as a 3D drift simulator, but it’s more on the light side of that. Drifting isn’t an easy feat, so the game goes for the easy version of it, where if you simply turn your car while accelerating, it will proceed to turn into a drift and you’ll start to rack up score on it. There is a more complicated version of that, where if you so choose to you can use the handbrake button that the game supplies you with, but it’s so awkwardly positioned, it’s kind of sub-optimal to even attempt to make good use of it.

When it comes to the graphical fidelity of the game, it could be similarly compared to an old PS2 game. With the game being released in 2016, there’s not really any excuse to have outdated graphics. Obviously, the graphics aren’t the main point of the game, but the rather lackluster graphics really put a damper on the experience. In addition to that, the general UI for the game isn’t anything too special either. When you press buttons on the screen, you get very little in terms of a response, other than just your typical action. It would be more streamlined if there was some form of animation when pressing buttons on the screen, but the lack of animation simply just does not help the game in the slightest.

I haven’t really come across too many bugs in the game, however there is one I have encountered more than once, and that was all on the same run. Effectively, I accidentally rammed into one of the barriers, and my car flew two or three feet in the air, before eventually coming back down onto the ground and righting itself. It was quite a bizarre event to witness and what made it worse were the shadows for the car. Whilst I was in the air, the shadow appeared displaced and simply did not look natural in the slightest, demonstrating that the only real focus for the game was the driving and less on any real polish.

One element the game does do a good job of, however, will have to be the audio. On the store page they say the game features realistic engine sounds, and I completely believe them. When you’re on the track and your engine is roaring, it really does sound like something you would expect, and the game easily gets points for that. However, the soundtrack for the game is pretty lacklustre, and you will probably find yourself getting bored or tired of it fairly quickly after a few runs.

The camera in the game doesn’t appear to be a problem, as it does allow you access to four different cameras, and it’s easy enough to find one that you prefer playing with after playing around with it for a little bit. It’s a good thing that the camera is on point for this type of game, because a bad camera system can quickly ruin a decent driving experience.

Overall, Drift One is mostly an okay game. It doesn’t do anything too wrong, but it doesn’t do all that much right either. The biggest problem I've seen in the game is the awkward jumping bug that one time which made me drive into a wall, and the fact the game plays an ad every time you finish a run. The audio for the game is nice; however, the soundtrack is not. Gameplay isn’t anything too special, but it’s easy enough to pick up for the most part.