Live out your Fast and the Furious dreams with Canadian-made Absolute Drift [Game of the Week]

Have you ever watched Fast and the Furious: Toyko Drift — clearly the best entry in the long-running, over the top action series — and wanted to burn rubber and slide around corners in a sick car with the best of them?

If your answer to the above question is yes, then Absolute Drift is the game you’ve been waiting for. While British Columbia-based Dune Casu’s (@funselektor’s) Absolute Drift has been around for a few years now, originally releasing back in 2015 for Windows and then making its way to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016 and 2017 respectively, the game is finally now available on iOS. 

The game tasks players with mastering the art of drifting by completing various clever challenges. Similar to other Canadian-made mobile gems like Snowman’s Alto’s Adventure, Absolute Drift also features a minimalist, clean art style.

The true key to the game is gaining an understanding of how your vehicle handles. Once you know when to hit the gas and pull the handbreak, Absolute Drift’s physics heavy mechanics slowly start to come together.

For instance, hitting the pedal to the metal isn’t always a great idea. I quickly realized that pumping the gas and avoiding oversteering was key to building up my car’s drift multiplier in order to accomplish specific goals. The game’s various challenges and mechanics do a great job of helping players grasp the basics of the Absolute Drift, while also gaining an understanding of its more complicated elements.

This new mobile port of Absolute Drift is not without fault though. For instance, I’ve run into pretty significant lag during certain levels when playing the game on my iPhone X.

This problem seems to be optimization-related given that while Absolute Drift is a technically impressive game from a physics perspective, it isn’t exactly a graphical powerhouse in any sense of the word.

Further, the game’s on-screen touchscreen controls sometimes resulted in frustration. They’re tiny, which becomes an issue when trying to turn left, right, or even quickly pulling the handbreak to avoid an inevitable crash into a nearby wall. This is a common problem with a number of mobile ports, but larger, more pronounced virtual buttons would have gone a long way towards making it easer to pull off more precise moves.

Thankfully, Absolute Drift also supports MFi iOS controllers, which negates the on-screen control issue completely. It’s also worth noting that this iOS version of Absolute Drift is published by Saskatchewan based mobile game developer and publisher Noodlecake Studios.

Absolute Drift is available on iOS for $3.99 CAD. It’s unclear if the game will also eventually be making its way to Android.

It’s been awhile, but I’m back on my ‘Game of the Week’ grind here at MobileSyrup. Every week expect a new, often Canadian-made game to be highlighted in this column.