Thank you S&COR Games for sending us this game to review!

I remember checking out Need for Speed: Underground many years ago and thinking how different it was from the other games in the series at the time. It took place at night, in an urban setting, with a focus on street racing and drifting being major parts of it. Over the years it gained a bit of a cult following, with many calling for a resurrection of the series. While that hasn’t happened yet, some games have been inspired by it – and while I can’t prove it, I would hazard a guess that Drift Tuner 2019 is one of them.

Like many racing games, you can drive either from the view of behind the wheel or from above and behind the car. The 3D rendered graphics are pretty good for a small team, though clearly rough around the edges. The lack of anisotropic filtering is kind of obvious, but otherwise it looks pretty good. In the level you race in, it’s a rainy night in the city, and you drive around in your low-riding car. If you earn enough credits, you can buy upgrades to your ride, or get a new one.

You earn credits by driving with skill – either by going really fast, doing crazy stunts, or drifting. If you can drift for long enough or go fast enough for enough time, you can rack up multipliers that help you earn those credits even faster. If you can manage to go fast, chain it into killer drifts, and so on, Bob’s your uncle. Once you collect enough cash, you can then choose to gamble it all away in street races. What I found frustrating is that there is nitrous available – there is even an icon for it on screen – but I have no idea how to activate it. What button you are supposed to press is not obvious, and there is no ‘nitrous oxide’ button that you can map to your gamepad. So of course I lost lots of money, trying to figure this game out…

And that’s really my big complaint with this game: it’s really unpolished. It appears that there is just one medium-sized area, and the core gameplay is fun; there is plenty of potential here. The racing is fun, the drifting can be fun, if a little awkward at times. But the main menu cannot be operated by a gamepad, there are no default gamepad controls, the mapping function does not work if any of your sticks have even the slightest deadzone issues, and really, I could go on. It’s a game I want to like – but they need to spend some time polishing things up – quite a bit.

What I find interesting is that Drift Tuner 2019 clearly has a decent following, especially on Android. It has over five hundred thousand downloads from the Play Store! That’s quite impressive. I am glad to see that it has a solid backing, and the Steam version has thirty-two active topics on the Steam forums, as well as nearly fifty reviews. So it’s a game that has decent exposure, and has a great potential upside. I hope that the developers keep at it.

It does have an online mode, and I even saw some people were playing, but it wouldn’t let me start racing for some reason, so I played in free play mode. Most of the game is basically whatever the online mode is (the store page tag includes ‘massively multiplayer’, so clearly that’s the intention) as well as the single player free mode. If the interface was better, it might have been more clear what mode I was actually playing at the time.

Drift Tuner 2019 is a game with a lot of potential. It’s mostly clean morally, except for the racing girl with tight clothes and exposed midriff, and of course the gambling. The graphics are pretty good, and there is a good base for fun here. Right now the game has quite a bit of polish needed before I could easily recommend it. I hope they do so, as I think there could be something quite special underneath that paint. At least the price is right!