Twilight Drive

This is a game that you don't appreciate properly until you have played it through. It would be easy to dismiss it as gimmicky or lacking depth but that is definitely not the case. I'm sure you've seen from the videos that the game uses grappling hooks to control the cars. However, what it is difficult to appreciate without playing is how thoughtful you have to be in the way you play. It's a racing game but its unique system means that it is a new experience and so much more than a top-down racer. The main purpose of the game is to test your ability to conserve the momentum of your car through the track. There is no acceleration button (although braking is important on some tracks) and so you have to rely on your strategy, timing and the line you take to achieve this. More often than not, the most obvious 'racing line' route isn't the best one. This is because of the towers that you grapple onto. There are three kinds and two make you speed up whilst you are attached to them. As a result, you want to stay attached to them for as long as possible and due to the fact that the angle of your car relative to the towers impacts how early you can hook, you have to be creative with your lines to achieve this. This leads to the player always thinking about what they can adjust to improve their time - a puzzle to be solved. The first number of tracks introduce all these ideas but where the game really shines is on the later tracks. It's a challenge for the game as it needs to walk you through the ideas one at a time but it is when you get to the final tracks that you get the payoff. They are usually at high speed with chains of corners and jumps to time and play with which require a high degree of concentration. Once you get to these high speeds, the cars are trickier to handle - but definitely in a fair way. You have to be on the limit of your control to achieve the high speeds and conserve the momentum and on many occasions, you will spin the car. But that's when you just have to have one more try at it. It's addictive and it feels very satisfying when you conquer a track after initially struggling. If you have a friend who owns the game, you get ghosts of their cars on each track and there is a definite satisfaction in working out a way quicker than them. Essentially, it's a really fun, unique game but you need to be willing to learn the mechanics and play it through to get the best out of it.

Twilight Drive is a top-down driving game with a twist: grappling hooks for cars. Thankfully this proves to be a great mechanic rather than a gimmick and the system brings surprising depth with it. The different types of towers you can attach to give different effects which means the fastest line is not necessarily the traditional racing line - taking a longer route to hold on to an accelerator tower a little longer can be the difference between a silver and a gold medal. Discovering the best route is part of the joy of the game. When you nail a section on a circuit and get the flow between towers just right it feels like an automotive version of web slinging through a city as Spider-man. And when you get it wrong, you’ll want to try again - the driving physics feel challenging but fair, and I always felt like any mistakes were due to me, not the game. The tracks are short (around 30s -60s) so it’s great to pick up and play for short bursts, although that can easily turn into a longer session when you want just… one… more… go to try and shave off a few more hundredths of a second and beat your friend’s time. If you like the hunt for perfection in Trackmania, you’ll enjoy this part of the game. New mechanics are introduced throughout and the tracks are varied. If you have friends with the game, the in-game leaderboards keeping track of the head to head scores are great for fuelling rivalries. Highly recommended! (Disclaimer: I was involved in beta testing for this game)

I would describe Twilight Drive as a top-down arcade time trial game. It has unique driving mechanics - encouraging you to 'grapple' round corners and actively avoid steering (which slows you down). The game leads you into these mechanics gently (and gradually adds more as you go through the generous number of levels), and I found it pretty easy to get started with. Quite often I could 'pass' a level with a bronze medal on my first try, but I soon realised how much nuance there is to perfecting each level - it takes a lot of retries to get better, sometimes trying to perfect the timing of slingshotting yourself round a corner with the hooks, other times trying to master drifting - inevitably leading to a lot of crashes! Rather than racing against opponents, you are racing to beat yourself, earn medals and beat your friends, with 'ghost cars' (which brought back fond memories of classic rally games). I find it surprisingly addictive, quite often going back for 'one more go' to get that next medal - and the level unlocking requirements sometimes encourage this replaying to get enough medals to unlock the next level. It has a great retro indie feel, with lovely chilled out electronic background music. Overall, I would certainly recommend it to anyone looking for a different kind of driving game. (Disclaimer: I was involved in beta testing of the game)

Twilight Drive is a fun twist on top-down racing mechanics, where rather than managing your speed by accelerating and breaking, the concern is more about maintaining momentum by turning as efficiently as possible. Speed can be gained by grappling on to the corners or using the boost pads, and is lost by turning, but building up too much speed makes the car harder to control, so there is something of a balancing act in maintaining the right speed to take the corners perfectly and get the best time. All of this makes for a fairly unique approach to driving gameplay which really encourages efficiency and takes time to master. The tracks get progressively faster and more difficult, and introduce hazards like jumps and slippery roads. The difficulty progression is fairly nicely balanced so that as you progress through the tracks you'll gradually pick up skills, and then going back to earlier tracks you're able to post much faster times. The online scoreboards give a good incentive to do that and be competitive with friends. The game grew a lot just in the short time I was involved with beta testing, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves in the future (track editor pls! :P).