Tokyo Xtreme Racer DRIFT (PlayStation 2)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.8 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Alex Navarro
• Reviewed on: 05/03/2006
• Updated on: 05/17/2006
• Released on: 04/18/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: Tokyo Xtreme Racer DRIFT (PlayStation 2) Review

As the all-in-caps subtitle suggests, Tokyo Xtreme Racer DRIFT is longtime TXR developer Genki's first foray into the wonderful world of drift racing. A decidedly Japanese-centric style of street racing, drift racing is the art of letting your car drift damn near sideways around sharp turns and corners, often for lengthy periods of time. A far cry from the "hit nitrous and go really fast" style of street racing most of us are accustomed to, drift racing is more about control than pure speed. This element translates reasonably well into DRIFT, which tosses aside the traditional Tokyo Xtreme Racer formula to try to emulate the drift-racing genre as closely as possible. The problem is that after spending several hours drifting around the same corners over and over again and not really doing much else, the formula wears terribly thin.

The premise of DRIFT is that in the year 20XX (a fine year, if we do say so ourselves), the mountain roads of Japan are bereft of travel. Nobody goes there anymore, leaving them entirely desolate. Enter the Japanese government, with an incredible initiative to give the bored drivers of the country a kick in the pants by opening up these mountain roads to, of all things, drift racing. So you'll find yourself driving around these winding roads way up in the mountains of Japan. Of course, the government also wants to make sure that nobody gets hurt, thus they install the "latest safety measures" to prevent anyone injuring themselves. What exactly that means is never explained, but it reads like one of those fabricated story excuses for why the game can't seem to pull off any measure of damage modeling.

Lack of damage aside, the racing in DRIFT is pretty cut-and-dried. There are a few different race types, but the functional similarity between them all is that no matter where you are, you'll need to do a copious amount of drifting to get by. In fact, many of the game's races are built solely on point-score totals earned by pulling off bigger and better drifts. How well your car drifts depends largely on how the car you're driving is built, as well as what upgrade parts you're using. There are a number of recognizable cars in the game, and each can be outfitted with a number of different parts, including better engines, tires, brakes, suspension systems, and the like.

However, no matter how much you trick out your car, drifting is still an erratic process. The cars handle, in a word, poorly. The analog sensitivity is very touchy, yet there are more than a few occasions where the car simply won't respond quickly enough to pull off a decent drift. Other times, cars will simply spin out like crazy. On some level, this is accurate to what real drift racing is like, in that it's not a completely predictable style of racing. But in game form, it's just not that much fun. Games like OutRun or Ridge Racer, which take it to silly, speedy extremes, make it fun with said silliness. DRIFT is utterly humorless in its portrayal of drifting, and with nothing else to back it up, it just becomes tiresome and frustrating. Especially in races against other cars, since they some how are immune to the slowdown you suffer when you hit a barrier or anything else for that matter, and as such, can simply blow right past you if you're anything but perfect in your drifting.

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