Drift (Over) Drive is a completely garbage 2D top down retro pixel "drifting" racing game where you control a retro pixel car and have to drift around a racecourse. You get points for "drifting", which, because the game is so badly made, is just a matter of turning your car 90 degrees to the road and holding the "up" arrow. Seriously, it's that bad. There's an options menu for the game, and I'm not kidding here, you try enter it and it says the "options" aren't implemented yet, so basically you can't configure anything in this trash NW.js crapfest.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics.
The game only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this game has been specifically designed for people gaming on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers.
Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2023 (and this was released not so far back in 2017), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only appears around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
It's also important to note the publisher here has close business connections to a number of shady Russian asset flippers (eg, Mihai Morosanu) who show an organised pattern to scam and defraud gamers by asset flipping the work of others for profit. While reviews are about the games, gamers should be informed when developers act unethically. Whether these connections are the same developer using multiple accounts, or just working closely with other unethical developers, gamers should be warned about the harm to gamers by this developer and their associates. Buying games from unethical developers puts your money at risk.
Drift (Over) Drive is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.
