Top Gear: Drift Legends - Stig of the dump

Top Gear: Drift Legends wants to be a fun game about sliding haphazardly around a track, scoring points for the amount of time you spend sideways.

That's what it wants to be. What it actually is is a slightly crumpled mess. When a game manages to make drifting not that much fun, you know it's gone wrong somewhere along the line.

There are moments, moments when you're sideways and the dirt is flying through the air, when you can't help but smile.

But then you'll hit a rock, not notice, lose all of your points, and have to start the level again.

So it's a top down racer yeah?

Not exactly. It's part time trial, part score chase. Each of the short levels involves skidding through some zones, getting as many points as you can, and getting to the finish line before the timer ticks down.

Finishing a lap isn't the difficult part though, it's making sure you've done enough skids. Yellow zones double your points if you slide through them, and chaining together drifts will see your multiplier sky rocketing.

The problem is that after a few levels you'll know full well that making a single mistake will prohibit you from getting the requisite score to move on.

So you'll often find yourself reaching for the retry button after less than a second.

Then there's the collision detection, or rather the fact that the only way you know you've hit something you're not supposed to is when you notice that all those points you've been accruing in your epic slide haven't gone on to your total.

The controls don't really do anything to help either. There should be a fluidity here, but instead it feels like you're wrestling a bison that just wants to go and hide in the trees.

And on top of that, you don't drift in the same way you do in most other arcade racers.

Er, this all sounds a bit pants

It does. Because it is. There are moments when it's fun, but they're few and far between, and are always bookended by teeth-gnashing frustration.

Almost everything here is a misstep. Unlock a new car and you need to go back and do all the levels you've already completed.

Sometimes you can avoid the finish line, do a bit more skidding to top up your score, then cross the line to complete a level.

It's not smart, it's not easy to play, and perhaps most devastatingly of all, it's not any fun. And for an arcade driving game, that's the biggest sin of all.

Top Gear: Drift Legends - Stig of the dump

A broken, not particularly interesting game. There are better arcade racers on mobile, so go play those instead
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.