DRIFT21 Preview for Steam Early Access

Drift21 is a racing game by developer ECC Games and publisher 505 Games. In it, you build a car and are able to take it on race tracks. A fair warning, this game is in Early Access, so there isn’t much to do at the moment. “Not much” meaning I ran out of things to do within 2 hours.

The main focus of Drift21 appears to be assembling the ‘perfect’ racing car. The game allows you to walk around the garage and manually insert the parts into the car. While I understand this is supposed to give the feel of working on the car in person, as someone whose knowledge of vehicles doesn’t go further than the words ‘car,’ ‘truck,’ and ‘van’, this was confusing for me. In fact, the game only tells you where to place parts essential to getting the car working. Other things like a device to give the car a turbo, you need to know where they go yourself. This made the car assembly part of the game unplayable, unless you have car assembly knowledge.

There are 3 modes in Drift21: free ride, solo run, and time attack. I don’t know if the game designers intend to put racing against other cars in at some point, but it’s not there right now. Free ride is as the name suggests, you can drive around the course without needing to complete any objectives. Solo run will give you a list of objectives to clear. This list differs from track to track. Time attack will try to see how quickly you can go through all the checkpoints in a course.

One thing I would like to point out is the driving system itself. Whenever I was above half speed, if I tried to turn, the car would only drift. I don’t know if this is a bug or intentional, but it made trying to race through the tracks harder than it needed to be.

Another thing I would like to point out is the lack of tracks. At the moment, there are only 4 race tracks in the game. 4 tracks each with 3 modes that only take about a minute to complete, you could see everything the game has to offer in about 12 minutes after assembling your car.

Overall, I found Drift21 frustrating, although I can see why some might like it. Or at least, I can see people liking the car assembly part of the game.

Check Out the Drift21 Trailer:

DRIFT21 is available for PC via Steam Early Access for $24.99.

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