Intro - The Pitch
Inertial Drift (official website) is a very stylish drift racer that promises to be simultaneously unique, satisfying, and accessible. I'm here to say that those promises are delivered on in a delightfully comfortable arcade-style, "gameplay-first" approach. "Easy to pick up, hard to master" is a worn phrase but it absolutely applies to the experience on offer here.
I'm a longtime racing game enthusiast myself but Inertial Drift is a title I can heartily recommend to even causal players as a satisfyingly good-feeling video game. In short, the game offers simple, intuitive controls that let you play with a diverse selection of cars and tracks, offering plentiful ways to improve and perfect your drift skills. The game's identity is strongly centered around the core gameplay, and it results in a tightly-designed, complete-feeling package. The visual direction is engrossing, pacing is brisk, different modes give you variety in play, and the soundtrack is in my opinion the co-star of the show, rivaling only the gameplay itself in its excellence.
Sound interesting? Then let's take a trip down the touge.
Inspiration - Project D and Type 4
Inertial Drift wears its inspiration on its side-skirts, the most prominent of which are Initial D (likely also the inspiration for Inertial Drift's namesake) and R4: Ridge Racer Type 4. Thankfully, this doesn't stop with surface-level references, and instead it feels as if Inertial Drift is a heartfelt homage to its predecessors. Fans of Initial D and R4 might be excited at the prospect of a modern game that works to capture the charm of each's interpretation of drift racing. For those unfamiliar with either, be prepared for style, style, and more style. Initial D and R4 have different takes on the topic, but they both show off drift racing as beautiful, fun, and occasionally emotional. They tell stories where the driver, their vehicle, and the environments the drive in are all equally important.
These are some large shoes to fill and Inertial Drift does an admirable job living up to them in the visual and sound department. Colors are vibrant, with a subtle 90s VCR fade and chromatic aberration. Cars are retro-future references (oft thinly-veiled) to vehicles both new and old with a Ridge Racer-esque coat of stylization to help adapt the real-world inspiration cars into vehicles fitting the "Outrun future" setting. The main game soundtrack with urban electro, acid house, and upbeat jazz, is supplemented by the almost-obligatory Eurobeat soundtrack of the Twilight Rivals DLC. Tire squealing is clear and satisfying without becoming grating (an important balance some races you might be drifting the majority of the time), and engine noises are downright sci-fi, like the most out-there concept cars from the Ridge Racer series.
The only department where I feel Inertial Drift falls significantly short of its inspirations is in its storytelling. This isn't a huge deal for such a gameplay-focused arcade experience as Inertial Drift, but it's a frequent complain of reviewers and one that I agree is an unfortunate weakness. Initial D, as a manga-turned-anime, is quite obviously concerned with its story. But I think it's also notable to mention R4 is a stand-out in many people's minds because of how well it blended its story with gameplay. The tales R4 told were neither grandiose nor overly ambitious, but they were surprisingly deep and at times emotional while still fitting in the bite-sized interstice between races. The story (or rather, stories) of this Playstation classic didn't interfere with the pacing of the game and if anything helped maintain a dynamic rollercoaster of highs and lows both in the garage and on the track, lending gravitas to your wins or losses. The stories from Initial D and R4 are inextricable from their racing, which is one of the things that makes them so special and fondly regarded by racing fans. Inertial Drift doesn't quite hit the mark in the same way in my opinion, and we'll dive into a little about why later.
I'll take this as an opportunity to turn this into a two-way street of recommendations for readers here. Fans of Initial D and R4 will find a love letter to their favorites within Inertial Drift, and those who enjoy Inertial Drift will most likely find something to love in those older pieces of media. Me? I just like all of them, and want us all to get along.
The Focused Package
Let's talk about Inertial Drift itself. You boot up the game and after a nifty animated introduction have access to a spread of different game modes. The very brief playable tutorial should be enough to get a handle on the simple controls, and you're off to the literal races. From this point, you have a starting set of of cars, tracks, and mode types to try in Arcade mode, directed Challenges, and a Story mode. The story mode is probably the best immediate jumping-off-point from the tutorial and is, in a sense, an extended tutorial.
I believe the structure of the story mode outlines the way the Inertial Drift developers recommend you practice the game. You choose a character (and more importantly, car), and then gradually tour a selected sequence of tracks with tasks of (usually) escalating difficulty. The progression is rather graceful. As you play more challenges in a given track, your course knowledge strengthens and you're able to face off against trickier lap times and opponents. As you master each track, your handle on your selected car grows and you are better equipped to tackle more technical tracks. Finally, completing a story with a given car gives you a basis to either continue the challenges in the other modes, or start another story with a more difficult vehicle (and oftentimes more difficult courses in the story mode to boot!).
Inertial Drift is really about one thing: building your mastery. Every car, every track, and every car+track combo is a unique challenge that you use the same skills oriented in slightly different ways to shave off fractions of a second to edge out your opponent for 1st position or beat the gold medal time. This is what I mean about Inertial Drift being focused. There's no car upgrades or tuning, no nitrous boosts, no skill trees, no currency grind. 90% of what you'll be doing is driving the courses with the goal of doing it as fast as you can (with several different flavors of modes all boiling down to that end). The remaining 10% is the relatively barebones point-focused modes that test your drift skills and precision.
This leads to my caveat. If you don't enjoy the first hour of Inertial Drift, you might not have anything else to look forward to. The game is all-in on its gameplay. Mercifully, it shows its whole hand early. What you get in the first moments of the game will be indicative of the entire rest of the experience. Within the first 15 minutes of play, there should ideally be a lightbulb that lights up in your head as all the pieces fall into place and Inertial Drift ascends to becoming one of the best-feeling racing games you've ever played. If not? You have no idea what you're missing.
Structure - The Smooth Curves and Rough Edges
My point here is that Inertial Drift is essentially a vehicle to deliver its gameplay. It's an effective one, as everything you do has you engaging with the cars and courses, presenting often-demanding challenges that give you skill goals to work towards. One odd consequence of this streamlined design is this sense of pressure to constantly be practicing and improving. It's a core theme of the game's story mode, and the way the game is structured is directed towards that gradual polishing of your game skill. This is generally a positive, but can result in a feeling that you always have to work towards getting the next-highest medal ranking, improve your lap times, or learn a new car or track in order to make progress. Outside of moving the story forward and unlocks tied to challenge rankings, there's not a lot of "progression" built into the game beyond the intangible improvement of your own skill. Some might find that compelling, and I do too, to some extent. But booting up the game, labbing a specific car/track combo to shave off less than a second of your personal best time (but not quite enough to get to the next medal threshold), and then shutting it down with no change to the game state can feel a little discouraging. Maybe that's just a me problem.
I've seen some complaints about the game's story and characters, which I also get to some level. The very first story most players will experience is Edward's: the story and character is all about the friction between hardcore focus on improvement and just having fun racing. Edward can come across rather whiny, constantly complaining about not wanting to be pressured to grind time trials and improve lap times. This doesn't sound like the most heart-pounding racing story out there, but Edward is one of a full cast of characters that all have different levels of experience and philosophies on racing, with a different vehicle and combo of tracks and challenges to make their stories feel mechanically distinct as well. It's as if each story exemplifies a different kind of racer, or player, and how each of their approaches have pros and cons. It's pretty allegorical, and viewing things like that makes each of the characters' personalities feel less grating. The four base game stories following Edward, Ada, Ibba, and Viv show off the extremes of the just-for-fun player, the self-improvement junkie, and the PVP-head. These characters butt heads and argue about their different approaches, and that interaction can feel enjoyably nuanced. The story characters might start off presenting a caricature of a play-style, but definitely don't end staying there.
The last two points meld into this next one: story is one of the primary ways Inertial Drift delivers its tutorialization. The brief 5-minute tutorial accessible from the main menu is enough to get you a feel for the basic mechanics, but all of the nuance is left for you to experiment on and figure out for yourself... unless you read the story segments. Characters will drop hints or outright explain how certain mechanics and game physics work in conversations. Wondering how a racer took such a tight turn at speed? Maybe they'll directly tell you how they slammed the accelerator mid-drift to whip the rear end out and sharpen their car's drift angle. The character's won't tell you to "Release RT and then, while holding RS in the direction of your turn, quickly depress RT fully during your drift! Watch the drift angle meter carefully!", you'll have to figure that out on your own. This makes me wish there were a menu option with a little collection of the racing tidbits you encounter throughout the story. Some are easy to miss as they're blended into conversation, and others only apply to a specific course or car that you might not be practicing at the moment. And if a player eager to jump into the action just skips the story mode entirely, well, they're not getting any of these useful pointers at all.
⚠️ But Is It Really Racing?
Inertial Drift has one major design choice that I have to bring up to prospective players. It is primarily a time trial game, even in its ostensible race or duel modes. Why is this?
- At maximum this is only one other opponent car in the competitive racing modes. There is no racing "grid", just you and at most one opponent.
- There is no car-to-car collision. Explained by the in-universe "Phase Shift" system, Inertial Drift contains plenty of car-to-wall collision (from your own mistakes as you learn a track) but none between racers. There are no consequences to drifting too close to an opponent and bumping them, since you can't bump them.
- Opponent car AI seems unaffected by the way you drive or the mode you're playing. That means that time trials, ghost trials, races, and duels all feel the same. You play the same way--fast lap time equals win, slow lap time equals lose (there's more nuance, especially in the duels, but that's the general gist all the same). The "battles" between you and your rival that you might aspire to from Initial D feel like simple coincidence where you and your opponent happen to be going at the same pace, and just as easily disappear when one of you pulls ahead.
- The AI does react to you leading or falling behind in the onscreen dialogue, but as far as I can tell they drive the same way no matter what you do. "Live" opponents seems like time trial ghosts but just not see-through.
I'm careful to call this a design choice and not flaw because Inertial Drift is absolutely designed around this consideration. But being a little harsh here, this makes pretty much every race some variant of a time trial, with your choice of visual distraction in the form of the duel UI and the onscreen opponent car being opaque, transparent, or nonexistent. For some people this is understandably a deal-breaker, and I'd rather they know upfront that there isn't the traditional format of racing that you might be used to than for them to be sorely disappointed when they try out a game that I still strongly believe is fantastic.
Presentation - Why I Keep Thinking About This Game
Being honest, Inertial Drift's memorable gamplay is only half of why I love it. The other half is how it's presented to you. Kab Driver and Kaidi Tatham have produced what I'd say is a best-in-class racing soundtrack for this game, and I cannot praise it enough. R4 fans in particular are in for a huge treat with the musical selection that spans genres and moods while maintaining that cool, 90s-retro-future Inertial Drift feel throughout.
I want to specifically highlight the dynamic nature of the soundtrack: each course environment has a prelude that plays in the lead-up to racing and menus, a main theme, and a final portion of the theme that plays during the final lap or otherwise ending moments of your challenge. This goes a long way in making each course and each environment feel comprehensive and immersive, and produces a regular progression in music that's matched by the rhythm of your gameplay. You prepare, dive into the challenge, and finish. Repeat. Simple but immensely satisfying.
Visuals are striking, stylized while remaining clear and communicative. Cars are exaggerated to emphasize their handling traits, and the diverse track environments serve double duty of giving you a new carefully-crafted zone to experience and cluing you into how the upcoming track will be designed (Snowy mountains? Expect narrow passes and bombing downhill!). The game lacks a minimap so map knowledge and memorization are eventually necessary, but Inertial Drift does an admirable job designing its tracks so that very few turns are blind and will instead use environmental cues to show you how long and sharp a turn will be. There are only a couple "wait, I was supposed to turn there?" moments and most times over- or under-shooting a turn was simply a matter of lacking experience, rather than lacking information.
I could go on about the slick UI, nostalgic color palettes, and impressive camera pans of the pre-race that show just how much time and effort must have gone into making the world Inertial Drift inhabits. Seeing is believing, so I simply recommend you try, and see, for yourself.
Closing Thoughts
Inertial Drift is a strong and hearty recommend. Moment-to-moment gameplay is an utter joy, and the game feels complete with its roster of unique cars and tracks--supplemented even more by its Twilight Rivals DLC. Inertial Drift knows exactly what it wants to be, and what it doesn't, and goes all in on being a tight, challenging, and deep racing game that's still instantly accessible.
Inertial Drift is available on PC and current consoles. My review/recommendation is based on the Steam version, played on both Windows and Linux (SteamOS on the Steam Deck).