Pixel Drifters Review - A game worth chafing the rubber off of your tires for?
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iOS
| Pixel Drifters

Arcade games are the sort of things that are pretty much perfect on mobile.

They're usually high score-chasers, easy for picking up and playing, and great to playing for a few minutes at a time while you travel home or wait for your coffee.

Unfortunately Pixel Drifters misses that mark, leaving you feeling more unsatisfied than entertained.

Kicking up dust

Pixel Drifters is a pixel-art drifting game where your primary goal is to drift around a cluttered space, racking up as many points as you can.

Along the way you've also got certain goals to hit, like opening up gates, collecting a defined amount of big coins, and getting multiplied scores.

The controls lend themselves well to whole 'drifting' side of things as you tap the left side to skid left and the right side to skid right. Nice and simple, right?

The level design looks procedurally generated at first, but after a fair few goes you'll see that you actually just spawn at different points in the map whenever you crash out.

And, oh, you'll crash out a lot.

Drifting 'round corners

Much like a lot of free-to-play high score chasers, you can unlock different cars, each of which have their own unique quality to aid or hinder your play.

These can be bought at random by using the coins you've either collected or been gifted and can be swapped out in the main menu.

Pixel Drifters' enjoyability had three stages. Stage one: giving it the benefit of the doubt while you get a feel for the controls. Stage two: having a little bit of fun and thinking you're doing okay. Stage three: crashing that one time too many and then it's not fun anymore.

The sheer clutter of the levels is what made the game a little obnoxious at times. Regardless of how many cars you unlock, it's definitely a game to be played with one of the smaller, more handleable vehicles.

You'll find quickly that it's extremely difficult to stay alive for very long, and that sometimes you'll run into an obstacle which blends into the background.

If you go for too long without collecting coins, however, your screen with get all smokey and the level will simply end. Though, you can watch an advert or pay a sum to get another shot at the same round if you're on a roll.

Burnout

Pixel Drifters is entertaining for a short period of time before it starts getting more tedious than titillating.

Had some of the obstacles been placed a little wider apart, and if there was more variety in the levels, it might not seem so frustrating at times.

But, it isn't awful and for those smaller, in-between moments, it will do the job nicely if you've got the patience for it.

Pixel Drifters Review - A game worth chafing the rubber off of your tires for?

Pixel Drifters has the right idea, but its level design and repetition made it hard to get into the game properly before burning out
Score
Emily Sowden
Emily Sowden
Emily is Pocket Gamer's News Editor and writes about all kinds of game-related things. She needs coffee to function and begrudgingly loves her Switch more than she lets on.