This is a love letter to rallying. Whoever put this together really loves rally and it shows. It's taken the core aspects of rallying and remixed them into a scifi game without the usual cruft of rally games, centered around an offroad truck that takes work to drive quickly. You're not racing for position, you're just ultimately hauling an item cross-country. Simple.
Note: I originally wrote too much for Steam to post this. I wound up tacking on a few comments to get the rest of my thoughts out and committed. But hey, this is Review #300 and I saved this for an extra-wordy ramble.
Obligatory sidenote: Rallying, as a form of racing, is a point-to-point race against the clock on complex roads, often dirt. These are not immaculate, mirror-smooth circuits (though I desperately adore circuit racing), they're often crap roads: rough, nasty, and diabolical with blind corners, jumps, surprise rocks. Drivers get a navigator and are allowed a couple drive-throughs to preview the bit they're going to race, and the navigator makes notes to call out to the driver when it's time to do the course competitively.
Here, you have to do both roles yourself, the only navigation to be found is whatever you do your own self. If you don't make notes, you get no notes, if you don't have strong recall well, best of luck! If you're lucky, you can find a map station to give you a decent but not 100% accurate overview of the area.
Instead of racing, you're trying to transport a rapidly-overheating power core. There's cooling stations hither and yon, so you need to find a station along the way, then rapidly transport the core to it. In your truck, it overheats, so time really is of the essence.
Unhappily, you don't know where the cooling stations, so you'll have to find them on your own.
You're not left entirely twisting in the wind. Wander around, you may find a map station as mentioned above. It's good enough to get you around, and [i]may[/i] point out other locations of interest. I started taking screenshots of them and assembling composite maps of the region in my second monitor for my own navigation. Regions covered by two maps reveal how inconsistent the maps the stations give you are, they're really more of a vibe, a back-of-the-napkin doodle. It gives you the gist of what to look for.
And, ultimately, that's why the game is called "ADRIFT". Not "aDRIFT", "ADRIFT". It means "lost". You get lost a lot, that's kind of the point. Meander about the countryside, what's left of the wholly abandoned, gone-to-seed ruins of some old world, following what might be left of the old road network, to locate the next cooling station you need. Hope to blunder into a map station so you can start getting a picture of what to expect.
Ultimately, you work out the route you need to take, make note of shortcuts, and when you're satisfied, go pick up your core from one station and dash to the next. Hope your navigation is good. If you don't get there in time, the core goes, and that's it for you and, gosh, a lot of the planet I suppose. Or just respawn, the accident never happened. You know, video game logic.
Fortunately, the game has a few mercies for the player. You can, at will, teleport to the last cooling station you've deposited the core, so if you're desperately lost, you don't have to stay that way. Even with the core in your truck, you can still go back, so you don't have to go experience the gameover screen if you totally wang your dash to the next checkpoint.
I ssaid before that the devs love rally sport, because there's a lot of attention lavished on your truck. It sprays out great gouts of dust when you mat the gas pedal, wheels spinning, engine screaming and banging off the rev limiter. A power drift shoots an arc of dust. Big jumps have your wheels dangling, suspension slack. It's clearly got a lot of travel in it, squashing down on hard corners, understeering so much you measure your turning radius in kilometers. You need to work that beast to get it to turn, getting set up in advance, shifting the weight to the front wheels to get them to bite, a skosh of handbrake to get the back end loose. The engine is weird, high-pitched, like an electric and combustion engine had a weird bastard child. It's clearly got a rev limiter and transmission, but it screams in a high-pitched key, and you never worry about gas.
The "roads" are lumpy and a bit slippery from dirt, but the truck is heavy, stable and utterly indestructible (the core going off notwithstanding). Even still, it has terrible inertia, it's not agile, so you need to work it into a slide (which takes effort, it's a freakin' overbuilt truck after all) and load up the suspension for cornering well before you get to that corner. Happily, while it's fast for a truck, it's not fast for a racing vehicle, so if you can convince yourself to look ahead and plan for your moves, you'll be fine. It's not exactly leisurely, but it's not twitch-reflex fast either.
The world is weird. It's abandoned, overgrown, not a trace of another human anywhere. The colours are beyond saturated, they're actively blown out, almost painful to look at. Dirt is not just red, it's [i]RED[/i], the very essence of redditude. it's fast to drive on, it's often your road and sometimes isn't when you're crossing the red desert. Heavy plantlife is green, it slows you down a lot, so it's best to stay out of it when you can (but some shortcuts may be worth it). Really difficult, dangerous terrain is blue: anything that can high-center you, cliff faces, that sort of thing. Best avoided, but sometimes worth it. Some of the colour schemes changes later, but it's always easy to spot fast/slow/dangerous terrain. And the water is luminescent, thick enough you can drive over it, though not quickly
The camera pulls back as you gain speed, reducing the sound of your engine as it goes. Go fast enough (like in a long straight) and it's the engine is entirely inaudible, just some quiet, weird ambient music playing as your truck hauls ass. Reminded me of helicopter chase shots of the Baja races, in a way. It's weirdly peaceful. When you're just meandering the countryside to find the next checkpoint, there's no time pressure anyway, so it literally is kind of relaxing. As long as you don't mind being lost. I mean ADRIFT.
You might stumble on a repair kit in your blunderings about the countryside, which you can use to repair a bridge and give yourself a shortcut. Supposing you can remember where that bridge is. These are sometimes required but often not, but generally worth the effort.
Every now and again, you do something that provokes some poetry. The poetry stays on the screen longer than it's welcome, if you ask me, and maybe you'll find beauty in it. I'm not often a poetic sort of person (though I do appreciate an artfully-crafted psonnet, I suppose), but I know others feel differently. Give yourself permission to enjoy it, nobody else has to know. Your secret will stay safe with me. That said, some of the poetry gives hints on general navigation notes, so it's worth a glance. And it does work better than a Sushi K rhyme.
