Drifting is an art form requiring precision driving of a vehicle to slide around a track, or even down a mountain. While drifting is a time-honored motorsport that originated in Japan in the 70s, it was only really adopted in the late 90’s in Western Culture largely thanks to media like the Anime Initial D, Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift, and arcade games like Midnight Tune. Project Drift Japan Challenge from Integer Games aims to race onto your Switch with a Midnight Tune flair. What’s It Like? You know what, don’t even get into this car as nothing good will come of it… let’s find out why.
Usually, I preface bad reviews by saying that I don’t like writing bad reviews, and that’s absolutely true as I understand that behind the start button, there is a person who has tried hard to make a game that may miss the mark unintentionally. This isn’t the case here, as Project Drift is an intentionally deceptive title, being sold as a product that simply isn’t as advertised. We’ve seen titles like this before on the E-shop, and when I was first starting out, one of my videos led to a publisher having to relist their games again using actual gameplay footage instead of the same images from Steam. Project Drift Japan Challenge is no different and uses PC screenshots to sell a product that is woefully different from what the screenshots lead you to believe.
The Gameplay of Project Drift Japan Challenge sees you enthusiastically race against an opponent through a windy track to defeat them and obtain their car. Despite being called Project Drift, there is absolutely no need to drift, and those who do will be at a distinct disadvantage in doing so, as even your opponent will simply pinball bounce off barriers to get to the end of the course. The driving model isn’t very intuitive, and you can hold a button to drift, or you can change your options to use inertia drift, which is overly sensitive but allows you to at least drift a little better. The entirety of the game can be completed in around 15 minutes, unlocking different cars based on real-world JDM cars like the Supra of Silvia. Interestingly enough, the 350Z and GTR features on the core artwork of the game aren’t included in Project Drift Japan Challenge at all. The replay feature that’s advertised isn’t in the game at all, the ability to listen to your own MP3’s which is advertised didn’t work no matter how much I tried to drift to the Wii Shopping channel music, and the advertised customize race option didn’t allow me to customize a race, and instead went to the normal race mode against the specific tracks car.
Trees sometimes pop in, textures rarely render until you are a few meters away, and even the polygons of the environments don’t render until you almost pass them, making Project Drift Japan Challenge a very unappealing game graphically. You can select a colour for your car which sometimes works, and sometimes leaves half the paint job of the other cars on there leaving you with some interesting paint choices. By default, all the cars are black and you can’t really see any details of them as the lighting is almost non-existent, and the game has a very distinct lack of optimisation. I think that if more care went into the port of this game, it could look and perform like the Steam version of the game. Would that be enough to save it? I’m not sure, but it would have been a better start.
Performance-wise Project Drift Japan Challenge is a mixed bag, mainly set back by its engine (no pun intended.) There is slowdown in some areas, but the worst offender is the textures and assets like trees not popping into view until they are almost next to you. For my vision-impaired drift enthusiasts, there are no accessibility options, I recommend further research if you really want to try this title to find out if it’s for you.
At $15 marked down to $2 AUD, Project Drift Japan Challenge is still overpriced. It’s clear since the Steam Version retails for $3 that this mark-up to mark down intends to deceive you into thinking you have a bargain on your hands, but make no mistake, Project Drift Japan Challenge is a slapdash zero-effort port not worthy of your time nor attention.
I will be emailing Nintendo to ensure the publisher uploads new screenshots that are actually representative of the final product, and will update this review when they do.
So What’s it Like? Project Drift Japan Challenge is like buying a secondhand car, and the engine seizes the second you drive it off the lot. Avoid at all costs.
