2170: The Slowest Racing Game You’ll Ever Play

My good friend Mr Alex Connolly saw that I had been investigating various racing games recently, and recommended something of an oddball curiosity to me: the rather literally named Off-Road Drive, a charming, clunky mess of a game from Russian publisher 1C Company.

Off-Road Drive is a game about offroading. Not offroading in the usual video game sense — that is to say, racing like you’re playing Ridge Racer, only with mud textures — but rather a more realistic(ish) take on offroading in heavy duty vehicles more suited to chores on the farm than barreling around courses at high speed.

The interesting thing about Off-Road Drive is that it goes into a lot more detail than many other racing games, yet at the same time manages to do so without making itself completely obtuse to the non-petrolheads among us. The game features not only the usual accelerate and brake buttons, but also switches to toggle between two- and four-wheel drive, do something or other with your differential, hoist yourself up with a winch, downshift into a low gear and let the air out of your tyres.

You may wonder why on Earth you would want to do any of those things and it’s initially baffling. However, a good tutorial mode gives you an introduction to the most common hazards you’ll face while offroading — and the appropriate tool from your arsenal to make use of when attempting to traverse it. By the end of a couple of laps of the tutorial circuit, you should have a pretty good idea of how things work and what you should do when. It’s perhaps best thought of as a racing game in which you’re required to use various special abilities at specific points on the track; thinking of it this way rather than trying to get your head around what the “differential” does is the way to go, it seems.

Off-Road Drive is not a particularly polished product. It doesn’t support VSync in full-screen mode, leading to screen tearing; its menus are clunky and don’t work properly with a controller (despite the game itself supporting controller); controller buttons are labelled the wrong way around (LT instead of RT and vice-versa); and its collision detection is occasionally a little questionable, but there’s little doubt that the developers set out to create something different to the norm and have succeeded in producing something that’s actually rather interesting and fun to play.

One of the greatest things about gaming is that it gives us the opportunity to try things we’d never do in real life. I don’t see myself ever flinging a Land Rover around a muddy course in Thailand, so Off-Road Drive acts as an eminently suitable substitute for now, at least.

Now, to go and look up what the fuck a “differential” is.