Take a guess as to the longest drift ever performed. We’ll wait (although you could just scroll down a little if you’re not willing to play along). If you guessed the BMW M5, with a wet drift length of 232.5 miles, then you’re definitely not guessing and you cheated. If you already knew this fact, pat yourself on the back, for you are a true auto aficionado. 232.5 miles sounds like a long way, right? Do you think you could drift that far? Reckon your car could handle it?
Yes, the longest wet drift ever was accomplished by BMW racing driver Johan Schwartz, who achieved the feat across an astonishing eight hours. Schwartz wasn’t alone, of course – another car drove alongside his, resupplying it when necessary – but it’s still a pretty impressive accomplishment. We reckon Schwartz is long overdue his own video game, although making a game solely about drifting exciting or involving would be a challenge.
Luckily, someone’s already taken up the mantle of doing just that. Developer Tastypill has created Sling Drift, a fun game about drifting and racking up high scores. Sling Drift may seem like a casual game on its surface – all clean visual lines and simple gameplay – but it’s deceptively deep, a game that requires excellent timing and pin-sharp accuracy from players. It’s a super-fun, super-involving little project that had us playing far longer than we probably should have.
The driver in Sling Drift probably isn’t Johan Schwartz, because there’s no way anyone is lasting eight hours on this game. Sling Drift is actually set up to dissuade lengthy play sessions; players are given tasks to accomplish over the course of their time with the game, and each of them can’t actually be redeemed for the gems they grant until “death”. As such, Sling Drift is a game more about living in the moment than planning for the future. It’s a true racing fan’s game.
Sling Drift’s initial startup process is refreshingly simple. All you need to do is hit space, or click your left mouse button, and you’re away – no need for lengthy menu navigation or character creation. As soon as you click, you’re playing, and the game does very little tutorializing, trusting you instead to learn and master its mechanics in the seconds required to do so before you could potentially experience your first failure. We’re big fans of the hands-off learning approach, and so it seems is Sling Drift.
There is one and precisely one button to press in Sling Drift in order to control your car. You don’t have any say in where the car goes on a direct basis; you can’t steer, you can’t accelerate and you can’t brake. Rather, you can simply toss out a rope which is presumably attached to your car in some respect. The rope will latch onto Sling Drift’s nearby grappling points, and this is how you turn your car and drift around corners. Once you’re lined up with where you want to be next, release the grapple and wait for the next one.
It’s testament to the skill involved in creating Sling Drift that this control method feels so effortlessly intuitive. One might think that many years of driving game discipline would need to be unlearned in order to rid oneself of the reflex to turn and accelerate, but this is not the case. Sling Drift isn’t really a driving game, although it certainly carries the aesthetic and spirit of one. Rather, it’s one of those arcade-style games like Frogger or Pac-Man in which there is one gameplay mechanic and mastering it is the objective.
Games like this are made or broken on whether their central mechanic is fun, so it’s a relief to report that Sling Drift passes this particular test with flying colors. Grappling around corners might not sound too complex, but it gains depth as you make progress. Corners become tighter and more closely packed together, and certain later-game track layouts mean you need to drift for a couple of seconds at a time to make it around corners.
In this way, the difficulty in Sling Drift increases subtly and slowly, allowing players to get to grips with the mechanics before presenting them with ever-so-slightly more difficult layouts. Any potential frustration at being sent back to the beginning on death is assuaged by the fact that the game doesn’t change too much as it advances, so players will never feel like they’re repeating themselves.
Sling Drift presents players with a single mechanic and asks them to master it, but it understands that in order to do so they’re going to need a continuous track, so it provides one. There’s no way to “win” in Sling Drift, so the basic objective is to complete challenges. These are varied and always interesting, and provide a solid excuse for simply playing more of the main game (not that an excuse is needed). The framework for Sling Drift is great fun, but it’s the core gameplay that shines.
We don’t have any problem recommending Sling Drift. This is a game you’ll keep on coming back to between meals, so to speak. It’s probably not going to replace your mega-sandboxes or your huge live-service loot shooters, but it’s an enjoyable romp with plenty of fun unlockables and a surprising amount of depth to its core mechanics.
