Previews

Hands on with The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift

Hold onto your throttle for this third instalment of I-play's street-racing title

Hands on with The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift

As a rule, we don't spend much time pootling around the streets of Tokyo at night in our 1.0-litre VW Polo. And a timely reminder of why our wheels won't hack it comes in the form of The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift, I-play's latest movie-derived racing game.

Like the film – which hits the multiplexes later this summer – The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift is set in Japan and is heavily based on 'drift racing', which basically involves zooming through the streets doing as many crazy skids as possible. In other words, if your tyres aren't screaming for mercy by the finishing line, you obviously haven't tried hard enough.

Like its predecessor, Tokyo Drift comes in 2D and 3D versions. The latter is fully 3D, but we played the 2D version, which takes a new perspective on the action compared to the last game's top-down viewpoint.

"We decided to go for a more slick pseudo-isometric view," explains producer Martin Lynagh. "We wanted to put much more emphasis on the drifting and car physics to tie in with the theme of the movie. We also wanted to make sure it's as good a game on low-end handsets as on more expensive phones."

The meat of the game is its Story Mode, where you have to race your way to the top of the Tokyo drift-racing scene. Each zone of the city has three racing events for you to win.

First up, The Call is a straightforward race where you have to beat three other cars to progress.

Show Off has you racing against the clock, but also accumulating respect by pulling off as many drifts as possible while hurtling around corners.

"It's based on the way drift-racing is done in real-life, especially in Japan," says Lynagh. "You accumulate points for controlling the drift, represented by a bar at the top of the screen, which fills up, and goes green once you've qualified."

Finally, Twin Battle is a head-to-head race against the local don of each area, where you have to finish first but also out-drift them – again, represented by a bar at the top of the screen that changes colour according to who's laying down the best, ahem, skidmarks.

As you'd expect from a street-racing game, modifying your car is an important part of the action. You can respray it and install cosmetic features, as well as performance-tune it, which helps to boost your score while racing.

"It's not just fluff that we've added in, as it has influence in the game and multiplies your score," says Lynagh. "You have to work for those upgrades, but it pays off. We tried to make something that's accessible, but still appeals to hardcore racing game fans. There's a lot of depth, especially when you start upgrading the car."

Besides the Story mode, there's a Survival Mode where your respect meter starts at a certain level and constantly decreases, forcing you to keep pulling off big drifts to push it back up, an Eliminator event where you aim to be the last car running, and a Time Trial mode, where you try to beat your own best lap times.

The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift will be out this summer, ready for the film's release.

Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)