
Welcome back to my Seven Gaming Heroes series where for the penultimate installment I’m going to talk about Absolute Drift: Zen Edition. Available on pretty much every platform except the Stadia and the Switch, Absolute Drift is an accessible and fun little arcade title focussed on pulling off stylish stunts while looking good doing it. In contrast to last week where we looked at Rocket League which is primarily about looking cool while driving fast in a straight line, this week we’re looking at the same thing except for driving sideways instead!
Developed by FlippFly, who also worked on Race the Sun from a couple of weeks ago, the Zen Edition of Absolute Drift is the port of the original game which was made by Funselektor Labs for release solely on PC. I first came across this title while watching YouTubers I liked at the time play it during its PC launch, and was disappointed that it wasn’t available on consoles at that time. It was a pleasant surprise little under a year later when it dropped onto Playstation 4 and Xbox One with next to no fanfare.

I purchased it on release day and immediately set out tearing around its five decently sized free roam areas, leaving drift tyre marks all over the place and sending stacks of aesthetically pleasing red cubes distributed across the map scattered all over the place. There are also 34 tracks in the game for you to compete in acquiring points for drifting around, but I found the introduction of walls detrimental to my drifting prowess so spent very little time on them.
The graphics are very minimalist without being uninteresting, and the stacks of red cubes I mentioned knocking over earlier lend a welcome dose of colour across the landscape on the frequent occasions that you collide with them.

With a top down facing camera to give you a full view of your surroundings on all sides, Absolute Drift pushes you to drift your car as far as you can. Each of the free roam maps set you a list of fun and relatively easy challenges which you must complete in order to unlock the next free roam section, alongside all the stunts you will be performing anyway just because you can. These challenges include jumping your vehicle over the ramps in each zone, drifting around a certain structure while remaining within a certain proximity to it, and of course good old fashioned accumulating points.

There isn’t much more that can be said about Absolute Drift, as it’s a very compact but solidly designed game that I managed to get hours of fun out of. The images displayed throughout this article will give you an idea of whether it is a game you would enjoy, but I can promise that even if games involving cars or anything associated with them aren’t usually your cup of tea, you can still expect to be pleasantly surprised by the experience that Absolute Drift offers.
Absolute Drift: Zen Edition hasn’t ever been a free game but is a common appearance in digital sales, usually selling for between £5 and £10, an ‘Absolute Steal’ at the former but still worth every penny for the latter.

Thank you for reading part six of the Seven Gaming Heroes series. Let me know on Twitter @MaliceVER or in the comments how your experience of Absolute Drift was or if I have persuaded you to give it a chance. I will be back next week with the final entry of my Seven Gaming Heroes where I will be talking about a title I have never mentioned on the site before, but is an indie game I have completed over twenty playthroughs of! You’ll have to come back next week to find out what it is, and so I look forward to speaking to you again then.