Universal Review
The battle of b0rked drift
by RevStu (November 12th, 2010 at 10:01 pm)
Drift Mania Championship HD is free today. I’d had a brief play of the Lite version when it came out and dismissed it as an uncontrollable and dull stunt game (and I hate stunt games, because I’m not 12). So this seemed an ideal opportunity to give it a second chance, especially as I’d bought my iPhone 4 since then and would have a chance to admire its gleaming Retina graphics.
I don’t think that’s actually them in the screenshot – it looks a lot crisper and shinier than that in real life, which begs the question of why a publisher would choose to use a low-res image when the high-res graphics are a sufficiently big deal as to be highlighted in the game’s title. But anyway.
The short version is, it’s still pretty uncontrollable and dull. Ratrod have given the game an unusual and effective accelerator-control system, whereby you can instantly adjust the throttle to any position you want it by sliding your right thumb up and down the edge of the screen. Unfortunately, they’ve then thrown away all the control-precision benefits this method affords by not bothering to include a touch-steering option. Tilt steering is all very well and some people like it and everything, but by its very nature it’s imprecise, because few people can accurately determine what’s exactly level and in any case it’s hard to judge anything when you’re looking at it at a 65-degree angle and flailing your upper body around. Which is a bit of a problem when you’ve made a game entirely based around precision control.
The result is that the best way to get good results is to drive really boringly and conservatively (PRO TIP: this is also the key to winning races in most of the PGR games), eschewing the handbrake entirely and trundling around the track with the minimum of fishtailing, controlling your car mostly with the throttle and slowing to a near-standstill if it looks like you might lose it. Doing this got me well into the silver-medal rankings on the first four or five tracks, and by then I was so bored of doing the same thing for corner after corner for several long laps and minutes at a time that I couldn’t be arsed to carry on any further.
Actually think about having to drift on every one of those zebra-marked bits, rather than pelting round the track at full tilt. Imagine how monotonous it would be, and is.
(The only real difference in the later tracks is that they’re twistier and more hairpinny, which means going even slower and becoming even more fed up with how difficult and tedious it is to get yourself pointing the right way again if you overshoot a tight bend, because even holding your iPhone at 90 degrees and driving at 5mph won’t turn you round fast enough.)
Outrun 2 is a game almost entirely about drifting, in which you spend a good 70% of your time going sideways, yet it’s enormous, joyous fun where Drift Mania Championship is dreary and technical and grey. The reason is that Outrun 2 makes triggering a drift the easiest thing in the world, whereas in DMC the process is more like learning to take a toaster apart and reassemble it on a bouncy castle surrounded by hyperactive 5-year-olds. The game is about as much fun as that sounds.
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