Drift Street International

Genre: Arcade Racing

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Wireless)

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Review:

Drift Street International is an Arcade Racing game released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2010 and then grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when that system was released. As the title suggest, this game’s racing has a heavy focus on drifting.

If you’ve ever played a racing game with Drifting, or even a Mario Kart game, you should have an idea how this works – tap the brake during a turn to start a drift, causing you to turn more sharply, at the cost of losing some control over your vehicle, with the trick being to learn how to correct for this loss of control. Drift Street International also rewards drifting by giving you a charge of nitro to give you a speed boost, but I found that these speed boosts were extremely brief and minimal, which was a bit disappointing.

Despite this frustration, I found the Arcade-style driving in this game to be excellent. The game controls great, the tracks have a fair amount of personality to them, and are diverse enough that different tracks genuinely feel different.

This is good, as the game contains only 9 tracks, which is perhaps understandable for an $8 DSiWare title, but still a bit disappointing. The game does try to inflate this number a bit by adding three different race modes – a standard race against three other vehicles, a time trial mode, and a checkpoint mode. However, this does little to fix the problem of a lack of content.

Still, while the game may be bite-sized in terms of content, it still packs a full experience with its presentation, using 3D visuals that may look a bit dated by today’s standards, with low-poly courses and a bit of pop-in, but it’s surprisingly impressive for a DSiWare game. This is joined by some good car sounds, and techno-style soundtrack that… Well, pretty quickly gets drowned out by the car noises.

In the end, if you look at Drift Street International as a full racing game on par with physical releases, I think you’ll find that the presentation may live up to those expectations, but the limited amount of content does not. However, if you look at this game as a tasty Arcade Racing snack instead of a full meal, I think you’ll find that this is an excellent game well worth its $8 price tag.

tl;dr – Drift Street International is an Arcade Racing game with a focus on drifting. For a DSiWare game, this game features a surprisingly good presentation, and the gameplay and map design are excellent as well. Really, this game’s biggest problem is a lack of content, with only 9 maps to race on. However, for only $8, this is still an excellent Racing Game for the price.

Grade: B

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