izigame.me

Wow. I bought this game because it looked cool, and that’s about the only credit I can give it - it does look pretty nice, but the gameplay is so poorly-designed, filled with blatant flaws and misleading content.
Inertial Drift tries to use its pretentious vaporwave drift racing aesthetic as an excuse for controls that are clunky, unintuitive, and imprecise. Ironically, despite the name of the game and its very blatant theme, most of the challenges in the game will actually require you to drift as LITTLE as possible to win, because it slows you down drastically and frequently makes you lose all control of your vehicle. All the while, you have the game’s cringey characters, trying way too hard to be teenage hipsters, who are constantly switching between telling you that “everyone makes mistakes” and “you can’t make any mistakes if you want to win.” (It’s also great when they tell you you’re driving “perfectly” while you’re 10 seconds behind the opponent).
That brings me to Inertial Drift’s gameplay loop, which is practically nonexistent. The game is incredibly misleading with regards to how much content it has—it boasts 20 tracks, 16 cars, and a whole bunch of events and gamemodes. However, it really only has 5 tracks, since each one has a reverse version, alternate path, and alternate path reverse version. There is very little variation between most of the cars—some have slightly higher acceleration or top speeds, but the main difference is that some of them can drift while you’re holding the gas, some of them can’t, and some of them you must actively be braking to drift. It makes the game so much more confusing that different cars have different drift mechanics to achieve functionally the exact same result. The events, though, are by far the stalest part of this game. Practically every single mode consists of you driving alone on one of the aforementioned 5 tracks trying to beat a certain time. “Time Attack” and “Ghost Battle” are the EXACT same thing, other than the fact that Ghost Battle renders an image of the ghost you’re racing against, while Time Attack only shows you their time. “Race” mode is also extremely similar, but it lasts for the full 3 laps instead of competing for a best lap time (note that some of the tracks only have one lap anyway, making Race mode exactly the same as the other two). Duel and Endurance are hardly different either. It just gets so boring and repetitive so fast, especially considering that the ghosts are pre-recorded and don’t even have AI. And regardless of whether you’re playing Story Mode, Grand Prix, Challenge, or any other mode, you’re going to be dealing with these same events on the same tracks, over and over.
I also haven’t even gotten into the fact that many of these events are stacked heavily against the player to begin with. If you’re playing pretty much any mode other than Arcade, you choose a certain car, and then the game will pick your events/opponents. The vast majority of the time, the game will put you on tracks and events that your vehicle is particularly weak on (i.e. if you have a vehicle with a fast top speed but low handling, you’ll probably be facing tracks with lots of winding turns), which means you never really get to benefit from your vehicle’s strengths at all, only try to battle through its weaknesses. Meanwhile, the opponents will be the opposite, making the matchups pretty questionable right from the beginning. It feels like no playtesting was done for these modes at all, because almost every event is either extremely easy, or feels completely rigged. In some of the events the opponents will even glitch out and get teleported ahead of the player—this happened to me in Grand Prix mode using the Velox Jet.
In that same GP, the game actually puts you on the icy track against the only car in the game that can drive off-road without drastically losing speed. There are many shortcuts on this track which the ghost will take, and the player physically cannot use them. This is a Duel event, meaning the leading racer earns points the longer they are ahead of the other. As is the case with, quite honestly, the vast majority of events in this game, the opponent racer gains a huge lead at the very beginning, and the player essentially has one single window to pass the opponent, and if they miss it, there will be no future chances to catch up later in the race because the opponent is simply in a faster vehicle. Once again, this is an absurdly common experience in any of the gamemodes where your matchup is determined by the game (I didn’t really play Arcade mode at all because it isn’t needed for 100%).
Another thing that really bugged me about Inertial Drift was that in Grand Prix, you are given 3 “retries,” represented by an icon that looks like this: 🔄. To any reasonable person, this suggests that you can “retry” 3 times, i.e. you lose on your FOURTH failure. However, the game actually treats these as lives, meaning you lose on your THIRD failure, so you are only getting 2 retries. This is incredibly misleading—they could have used a heart or literally any other symbol to represent lives, but it simply does not make sense for the game to say you have one retry left, when you are in fact on your last life.
In case it wasn’t extremely clear, I strongly recommend against playing Inertial Drift. It’s disingenuous, boring, frustrating, and overall just a poorly-designed gameplay experience in almost every way. Note that I did not play the DLC, but I can’t imagine it’s really any better than the base game with all its glaring flaws. The only way I could see this game possibly being fun is racing against friends on Multiplayer, but there are still plenty of way better options out there.
Yeah. Don’t buy this game.
And before anyone shows up to “skill issue” me - as I mentioned, I 100%ed the game. I’ve completed all the Grand Prix modes and everything, which is no easy task. I’m not bad, the game just is.