FAST AND FURIOUS
Hectic top-down survival action in DRIFTR
Driftr is a Vampire Survivors- like, meaning you’ll be fending off waves of enemies and carefully curating a character build, as a timer ticks away. However, you’re only being asked to survive for a piddly three minutes here. Child’s play. No, I haven’t managed it. Driftr is hard.
Where it differs from the rest of the genre is the nature of character movement. As if you’re steering a car, you direct the plain white block protagonist by using the Left and Right arrow keys. The block will accelerate automatically, but you can also activate a hard-to-control boost by holding either key down.
You begin by simply dodging enemies, which is tricky enough, before the temporary green and yellow zones are introduced. Successfully steer into a green zone and you’ll get a blob of health, while yellow ones will grant a choice of power-up. ‘Better handling’ felt essential, but you can also find abilities that trigger explosions as you get hurt. You’re trying to combine complementary power-ups that will allow you to last the three minutes, or as long as you possibly can.
It is a novel experience, manoeuvring a constantly moving vehicle around an arena tightly packed with enemies, but I could not get to grips with the top-down steering. Moving relative to the vehicle, and not from my perspective, is a thing I just find flummoxing.
Still this will be an enjoyably brisk Survivors-like, with a minimalist aesthetic and a soundtrack that could be described as ‘banging’.
Even by genre standards it’s a quick and cheap experience – free, in fact.