It has been a little while since the original Inertial Drift was released; a game that was hugely enjoyable when it first arrived in 2020, gathering up 4.5/5 in review. It was the inclusion of the “drift stick” which made for an interesting control scheme, and while I did have to recalibrate my brain to cope with it, I was soon sliding around the place like my wheels were made of butter and the road was a red hot frying pan.
Anyway, fast forward two years and some DLC and a new Edition has arrived, going by the name of Twilight Rivals. So, does this add anything worth your time, or should the game have stayed in the past? In a world where Forza Horizon 5 has taken over my life, is there room for another racer? Well, buckle up, we’re going to dive in and find out.
Now, the story found in the Twilight Rivals DLC is fairly slight, if I do say so myself. At the end of the main game we were the undisputed king of sliding about, generally getting on with yobbish behaviour. But it turns out we weren’t the king of the whole world. You see, there are other “crews” who may want to give us a run for our money, and one of them has rocked up and issued a challenge without so much as a by your leave. So, what else can we do but get in our motor and show these upstarts who rules these streets!? The crew that challenges us goes by the name of “Twilight Rivals”, and while there isn’t a sparkly vampire in sight, they do pose quite a challenge.
Inertial Drift was always a good looking game, with a great cel-shaded look that reminded of the late great Auto Modellista, a game from back on the Playstation 2. Now however, and without any fanfare whatsoever, Inertial Drift has been updated and optimised for the Xbox Series consoles, and so everything is extra shiny. I do love a free upgrade to the next gen, don’t you?
What this extra graphical horsepower means is that the game moves fast and smoothly at all times, and any crashes are solely your own fault. To be honest, Inertial Drift moves at such a pace that you’ll be hard pushed to notice too many graphical improvements (you certainly don’t have time to look in any shop windows, for instance), but it just feels smoother, compared to the Xbox One version.
Sound is all pretty groovy too, even if the cars do sound a lot like hairdryers. There are however plenty of “pumping Eurobeat choons” to be getting on with, including four brand new ones. Now, being old, I wouldn’t know a Eurobeat Choon if I fell over it, but the music is suitably fast and pumping to get the adrenaline up and keep you racing. All good so far!
Onto the gameplay and the best way to put it is that it is pretty much the same as the rest of the game that went before. Being a big fan of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, I can get onboard with this philosophy. This is very much a case of evolution, not revolution, and to be brutally honest, it hasn’t evolved very far from its roots. The main difference between this Twilght Rivals DLC and the base game is found in the new things that it brings – new tracks and cars. And after two years of playing the original, who isn’t ready for those?
The tracks are a varied bunch, ranging from a neon drenched cityscape that wouldn’t look out of place in a Cyberpunk game, through to ancient temple type surroundings. Honestly, we’ve seen these archetypes of track before, but the new layouts are challenging and fun to learn, so we’ll let that slide.
The new cars are a mixed bunch as well, ranging all the way from Sport Compact cars through to Super Cars. While they may not replace your favourite weapon of choice (the handling of some of these cars can be a little, well, spiky until you are used to them) they do add a new layer of challenge to the game, and collecting them all is no mean feat.
There are no new achievements dished out with the Twilight Rivals DLC for Inertial Drift, which seems like a bit of a missed opportunity, particularly when the original game pushed them out fairly regularly. It is all well priced though with the Twilight Rivals add-on coming in at £7.99; there is most certainly a good amount of challenge packed into those eight English pounds.
If you enjoyed the base game of Inertial Drift, then more content is always welcome. And if you never played it the first time around, the addition of the Twilight Rivals content means it is a good time to jump in, if only as it is capable of providing a fun diversion to the norm.
Inertial Drift: Twilight Rivals is on the Xbox Store
