izigame.me

TL;DR - There's an old literature critique that goes "What's new isn't good and what's good isn't new," and the quickest summation of Inertial Drift is that its qualities are the opposite of that, meaning "What's good is what's new, and what isn't new isn't good."
As a result, Inertial Drift is a game that can only be recommended to the niche of racing game diehards looking for something different as a palate cleanser or for variety, but cannot in any way be recommended as a general racing game to be picked up by the average player.
Not Long Enough? Read On - The most interesting and novel things about Inertial Drift (and thus the best parts about it) are:
1)That a game so heavily based off of Initial D came out at all in Anno Domini 2020, some 25 years after that manga debuted is just FASCINATING.
2) The Eurobeat soundtrack itself is absolutely fire, and one of the game's best qualities.
3) Most importantly, the game's control scheme, which is very novel and exclusively geared toward making a racing game feel completely differently than pretty much any other to actually control and is exclusively focused around giving the player precision control over drifting turns specifically.
It's a weird control scheme, because pretty much every other racing game on a controller has played almost exactly the same over the last 30 or so years, (not counting digital steering wheels/pedals). The left stick essentially controls your front tires and the right stick your rear tires while you drift, allowing more control of the angle of your vehicle in a turn. Once you get past the learning curve and get used to the system, it ends up feeling pretty intuitive, and the fact that it works as well as it does as quickly as it does definitely means the devs are onto something here.
It's simply refreshing to play a well-worn genre in a new way that changes your perception of it.
But the thing is, that's it. That's the game's one trick. Once you get the controls, there simply isn't enough game in this game for a full or complete experience outside of those initial moments of discovery.
There aren't that many tracks (more with the DLC, but even then the game doesn't break 20) and while the ones they have are well designed, there simply isn't much to sink your teeth into if you don't like constantly trying to perfect your clear times. And even though there are a plethora of extra modes and all the tracks get a reverse version , the simple fact is due what's either lacking manpower, skill or budget, a decision was made that absolutely drains most of these modes of life and vitality.
That decision is that in actual races against opponents, there's no collision between the cars, turning all races essentially into ghost races, which *really* means all "races" aren't actually races, they're time attack challenges. So all those options you seemingly have? Yah, naw. You just have 4 flavors of time attack, really.
I'm not sure if this was an issue with programming the AI on cars to account for collisions, or a choice on difficulty, or some other reasoning, but it just means that the "races" in this game have no spark or pizzazz or randomness to them. The rival racers you face off against don't feel like they can be interacted with in any way when you simply pass through them on the track.
Though it's not like these rival racers are worth the AI either. Because there IS a story mode, but it is the most basic, low-stakes, boring, design-by-committee safe blandness you could ever imagine. It's very rare that I'd recommend a game remove its characters in place of having the player just select cars, since I'm a huge F-Zero fan and I've always loved unique drivers attached to unique vehicles that reflect their personality, but those characters actually have to have personality in the first place for this concept to work, and they don't here.
(this character blandness reeks of its corporate DEI consultancy aesthetic, if that matters to you, with characters fitting every inclusivity checkbox you could think of while having no discernable motivations, attachments or conflicts other than generically "to race cars" - they seem like characters created for an advertising campaign to sell KIAs or a new line of smart phones - and frankly the character art is just bad)
All told, once you get past the admittedly good hook of a novel control scheme to expand and focus on what is usually a secondary mechanic in racing games - drifting - and play this game for even a short while, you quickly find that positive elements of this whole experience extremely ephemeral and fleeting, and even trying to convince myself to soldier on to play this game to get 100% of its achievements (because they're pretty easy to unlock here, from the looks of things) seems like it'd be such a slog that I'd rather just uninstall and move on. Which . . . yeah, that's not something I'd recommend to people.
On the plus side though, this got me to rewatch Initial D, which definitely hit me with a wave of DEJA VU!