How many airplane racing games can you think of off the top of your head? Any? Without resorting to Google, all I could come up with was one third of Diddy Kong Racing. This is exactly why I was instantly fascinated by Digital Reality’s SkyDrift. It’s in a sub-genre that’s rarely explored.

You could call it “Mario Kart in the sky”, but that really isn’t fair to the game. SkyDrift may be a weapons-based racer, but it’s far more deliberate and skill-based than any racing I’ve ever done in the Mushroom Kingdom. The fact that you need a second analogue stick to control your plane’s knife position is proof enough that the game is deeper than some of its contemporaries.

Using both sticks doesn’t just make you better, the hairpin turns throughout the cavernous tracks make adjusting the angle of your plane absolutely vital. This is especially true when making quick decisions. This comes up often as the tracks have plenty of branching paths to explore.

Some of the paths will help you shave some time off your lap, while others can be a great source of weapon drops. In my time with the demo, I traveled through valleys, caves, icy waters, and the occasional man-made structure as I shot at my opponents to slow them down.

Flying dangerously is actually rewarded. The more you hug the ground and walls (without crashing), the more you can fill your boost meter. It’s up to you whether to risk it all in order to gain the extra boost you need to overtake your opponent.

Weapon drops are not randomized. Instead, they have clearly marked symbols similar to Blur, so you can actually form strategies and grab the specific power-ups that will be useful to your cause. There are six power-ups in all including missiles, EMP, mines, machine guns, shields, and health refills.

You can hold a few different ones at once and cycle through them. Picking up the same power-up twice will actually change it into a stronger version. Or you can choose to get rid of it altogether by converting it into boost power, further expanding your options.

Each of the eight planes has their own strengths and weaknesses along with a variety of skins to change up the look. Eight is also the number of players in a race, both in single player and online multiplayer.

As a sucker for unconventional racing games, I found myself really enjoying what I played of SkyDrift. Moving in all directions certainly adds a lot more ways to cut lap times than being stuck on a road, and the many branching paths of each track kept them very interesting. I look forward to checking the full version out when it releases this summer.

Tags: Digital Reality, Flight Games, hands-on impressions, PAX 2011, PC, preview, psn, racing, SkyDrift, Steam, xbla

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2011 at 5:00 am and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.