Sling Drift Review – Wheels On Fire

There aren’t many of us here who would call ourselves racing aficionados. Some of us have seen a few races in our times, and others have even visited the hallowed sites of the sport like Silverstone and the Nürburgring. Despite those credentials, though, there are very few of us who actually sit down and enthuse about racing, who analyse the ins and outs of the discipline as obsessively as we do other things.

With that in mind, it takes a seriously special game about racing to drag us in and make us feel like we want to play it. Precious few racing games for major consoles and platforms over the years have done this for us. We have fond memories of Ubisoft’s Driver: San Francisco thanks to its wacky plot, and we’re quite keen on Forza Horizon for its ability to draw in even the non-racing crowd.

What we really love, though, are games that initially seem to be about driving but really are focusing on other parts of the gameplay. So it is with Tastypill and their games. Many of Tastypill’s titles purport to be about certain subjects – Spill It is about spilling things, Impossible Bottle Flip is about, well, flipping bottles – but really their gameplay is deceptively deep and goes beyond those initial setups.

Sling Drift is one such game. Like Tastypill’s Pick Me Up, Sling Drift features cars and “racing” at its center but isn’t really about those things. Sling Drift’s central gameplay mechanic sees players launching themselves around corners using grappling hooks, so it’s not really about the process of driving, or at least not unless we’ve missed something crucial about driverless cars.

So, if Sling Drift isn’t a game about racing, then what is it about? Well, if you’d like to find out for yourself, why not play it right here before we continue? After all, it’s free – what have you got to lose? If you’d rather read on, allow us to describe the game for you to sell you on it. Sling Drift is essentially a pretty way to see how your reflexes stand up against a series of increasingly difficult timing challenges. The test of quality for this game, then, becomes whether it can hold the interest beyond that realization.

Happily, the answer in the case of Sling Drift is a resounding “yes”. Sling Drift is a robustly-developed game that goes beyond its core concepts to deliver a consistently addictive experience to anyone who decides to play it. There are very few barriers to entry here; all you need is enough fingers to press the space bar (or click the left mouse button) and an inclination to stick at it even when you fail.

The core idea of Sling Drift is this: drift around corners using your grapple tether thing, and try to have the right trajectory when you’re coming out of a drift. To this end, you will need to attach the rope to each corner’s grapple point as you approach, then keep it held down until you’re at the right angle to let go and launch yourself towards the next corner.

Each time you do so, you’ll gain a point. Points aren’t particularly meaningful in a moment-to-moment sense, although they do contribute towards certain challenges and achievements which will net you in-game currency. Completing a set of challenges will “level you up”, launching you towards an incrementally more difficult set of corners which iterate on the core mechanics in clever ways.

The whole experience is expertly-tuned and always feels intuitive. There’s no point at which Sling Drift becomes “too much”, and although you’ll be pulling off ridiculous sequences of corners and drifts if you manage to get far enough, it’ll never feel like you don’t know how you got there (until you take your eyes off the screen, of course). In this way, Sling Drift holds the attention and manages to remain an engaging and enjoyable game even though it only really has one core gameplay idea.

There are, of course, bonuses and other things within the game itself to build on the central mechanics. “Perfect” drifts can be pulled off if players manage to maintain a perfect trajectory around a corner, and you’ll need to do so if you want to complete some of the challenges (although you can, quite cleverly, skip them with in-game currency). There’s also a race mode, which adds extra cars to the already-hectic gameplay and ensures that you won’t last more than a few seconds before a hilariously catastrophic crash brings your racing dreams to an end.

In the final analysis, though, the question for Sling Drift must be this: does it hold up solely on its core gameplay? This is, after all, what players will be spending the most time doing. The answer, as before, is a resounding “yes”. Sling Drift never stopped being great fun for as long as we played it, and we’re ashamed to admit the number of hours we put off working so we could return to Tastypill’s most delectable creation.