Drag Racer 3.01

Pimp your ride then race against other vehicles

Drag racing is all about jazzy tuned up cars, the ‘bling’ attitude and adrenaline filled races on abandoned highways. Pimp the interior and exterior of your ride and boost your engine to compete with other revamped high powered vehicles.

To be someone in drag racing, your ride needs to pack power and show some style.

Drag Racer emulates the tuning spirit. Your objective is to customize and improve your car as much as you can and win your races against all types of vehicles, from a Honda Civic to the Lamborghini Murcielago.

Choose your car among more than 20 different constructors and customize it completely from the steering wheel to the seats and exhaust pipes.

You can add wings and decals and give it a paint job. Win performance points to improve your ride in different categories like suspension, turbo, engine or ignition.

Drag Racer is certainly not your traditional racing game and you’ll have to get used to the way you drive. Use the space bar to accelerate and the up and down arrows to shift gears.

The difficult part is accelerating correctly at the start. Too late or too early and your engine will jam, giving your opponent a sufficient edge to win the race.

If you manage to start off correctly you then need to worry about shifting gears correctly. If you change gears too slowly your engine will blow up.

If you shift too quickly, there’s a risk that your opponent gains enough power and speed to ultimately surpass you. The difficulty is in the dosage and in the power of the car you have.

For all the ingenuity and settings available in Drag Racer, the game quickly becomes repetitive. The racers are always more or less the same since drag racing is held on a straight road, so you can forget about the curves and hairpin turns that make a racetrack so riveting.

The customization part in Drag Racer is extensive but unfortunately, apart from the paint job and exterior add-ons like wings, you’ll never get to see and enjoy your interior tune ups like the fuzzy steering wheel or gold pedals.

Drag Racer has an impressive number of vehicles to choose from, but the limited graphics are a bit of a disappointment as the joy of tuning is all about admiring your newly sexed up vehicle.

Drag Racer is nowhere as exciting as top notch racing titles like Need for Speed or Evolution GT. However, what it lacks in excitement it makes up in originality.

Drag Racer will probably really appeal to the tuning community but if you want to try out a different type of racing game, you should check it out.