Top Gear: Drift Legends

It is naturally with some skepticism that we sit down to review a game that makes use of the Top Gear license. How might a game based on the extremely popular TV show be entertaining? What could it possibly offer? These kind of tie-ins rarely deliver a satisfying experience. Our skepticism was proved correct.

Top Gear: Drift Legends offers up most of the ingredients needed to make a boring and mediocre mobile game. The concept is repetitive and the controls are far from satisfying. The various drifting missions take you from New Zeeland to Japan, but there's not much variation between the various tracks so it makes little difference where you are in the world. And no matter where you visit on your travels, you perform the exact same moves.

As the title implies each level comes down to drifting and collecting points. Most corners also offer a yellow zone that scores you extra points if you manage to drift within it. You need to score a certain amount of points in order to progress, and this means you'll need to drift for all your worth. At first it's rather entertaining to drift around in the small car, but soon the novelty wears off. Top Gear: Drift Legends isn't one of those mobile games that manages to turn something simple into something addictive and fun (like, say, Angry Birds). There's simply not enough here to make it worth spending your time on.

But even if the boring concept does its part to make this a short-lived romance, it's the controls that are killing it. All you can do is turn left and right and step on the gas. That's it. Simple controls aren't necessarily a bad thing, but here it's simply lacking in accuracy, which ensures that this game only frustrates. There is no precision and you'll drift left and right with little control, and you never get into that zone where you feel in full control. It's nearly impossible to tackle the most difficult setting.

From a pure design point of view it comes across as lacking any real identity. Nothing stands out, but while that is true there's also nothing horrendously ugly here. One has to think that the developers could have been a bit more creative and might have added a bit more character, or at least some more colours and a bit more personality to the courses.

Top Gear: Drift Legends fails to impress and you should look elsewhere for your mobile entertainment. Not even racing tips from The Stig can salvage this rather disappointing game.