Ever miss those cool drift racers from yesteryear? Data Wing channels F-Zero to give you a drift racer with a neon aesthetic on your Android or iDevice, and it’s completely free.
Simple as you like, you can control your craft by pressing on either the left or right side to turn in that direction. Turning is more of a drifty affair, and levels have varying degrees of gravity, so while the controls are simple, the overall system isn’t.
Gradually you’ll be presented with tougher and tougher challenges, most of which are in a racing or time trial setting, but some levels are so dastardly it’s hard enough just to get to the end.
Pressing on both sides of the screen will brake, and probably because I’m terrible at racing games, I never used that ability. But because of my tendency to slam into walls, I discovered one very cool thing: When your engines are close to a wall, they’ll actually push off it and gain a lot more thrust. You can absolutely use this to get a temporary speed boost and overtake others, and the fastest racers will be boosting off every wall they can. It’s almost a bit of risk/reward built into the core controls, as the closer you get to skimming that solid wall, the more of a boost you’ll get.
I usually don’t even like story in these types of games, quickly tapping through the dialogue so I can get to the gameplay. It usually feels like it’s only there because it has to be there. But not only did I start to enjoy the story in Data Wing, I sought out the unnecessary pieces of exposition that aren’t even attached to a mission.
I’ll say this about the story, too: It’s more than it seems.
Halfbrick co-founder Dan Vogt is behind this one, and for some reason (probably because he’s crazy, like in those Crazy Dan’s Crazy Prices ads) he’s decided to make the game completely free. No ads, no microtransactions. Free.
The description says it takes about two hours to finish, and it took me exactly that long, though some of the levels are absolutely worth time trialling if you’re so inclined.
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