Drift Legends 2

Genre: Racing

Players: 1

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Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS

Drift Legends 2 is a free-to-play Racing Game that unsurprisingly places a strong emphasis on drifting. Released on Nintendo Switch in 2024 and ported to PC in 2025, this game is the sequel to the 2018 Drift Legends, which was not free-to-play. Of course, in turn this means that you’ll be pushed to use real money to purchase cars needed to participate in some of the game’s races. Because of course.

Despite being a free game from a small developer and publisher, Drift Legends 2 is graphically pretty good. The 3D vehicles are nicely detailed, the environments look nice, the framerates are smooth, and while nothing is exceptionally impressive, the visuals are good for a free game. The sound, not so much. Car sounds don’t sound at all realistic or convincing, and there’s no music while racing either. It’s a really stark contrast in the quality of the different presentation elements.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is pretty lacking too. Most of this game’s races aren’t actually races, but instead simply challenging you to get a certain amount of points within a time limit. The point system in this game doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either – you gain points by drifting (naturally), and the longer you drift, the higher a multiplier you build up. You can easily win a lot of levels by simply staying in one spot and doing relatively low-speed donuts for a few minutes. A series of drifts ends after a certain amount of time without drifting… but when you’re not drifting your multiplier drops off too, with no way I can find to “bank” a combo and score the points – in order to score points, you have to let your combo gradually fizzle out, and in turn let your multiplier fizzle out too.

Even those few races that have you racing against a (ghost) opponent aren’t really races – they still require you to meet a point threshold within a time limit, but also making a certain number of required laps within that time limit. It doesn’t matter if the ghost driver finishes before you, you can still “win” if you get your points high enough and cross the finish line in time.

With all the emphasis placed on drifting, you would hope that the drifting mechanics here are realistic, or at least fun. Unfortunately, that’s not the case either. Your vehicle slides around like it’s constantly on ice, barely needing you to hit your brakes or handbrake to start drifting around. Your car takes agonizingly long to gain speed, and your brakes are ineffective for anything other than drifting, which is bizarre since that’s usually what the handbrake is for in Racing games.

It’s a shame because the visuals work so well here, but every other part of Drift Legends 2 is absolutely broken – the racing physics are broken, the goal design is broken, and the game’s structure is broken further by nasty microtransactions. You have better options for pretty-looking Racing games, even free-to-play ones. Go for one of those instead.

tl;dr – Drift Legends 2 is a free-to-play Racing game with a focus on, well, drifting. Graphically this game looks good, but everything else here is terrible, from the bad Racing physics, the nonsensical goal design, the awful sound design, and the disgusting microtransactions. Even if you’re looking for a free-to-play Racing game, you have multiple better options than this.

Grade: D

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