In Drive to Survive, you could be on the aforementioned ice rink, or you could be off in the desert somewhere. Variety is certainly one of its strengths. Sheesh.ĭrive to Survive doesn't bring a ton of new perks to the genre, though there is a reasonably entertaining game in here underneath the truly bizarre, potentially deal-breaking camera troubles discussed earlier. You can't even change your control assignments without first exiting the game and launching an external control setup utility. The game itself does not support joysticks or wheels - not that a top-down racer really calls for a wheel - and instead works only with the keyboard or a gamepad. How much of a port is it? The menus do not support mice. First appearing on European PCs back in 2004 and going through at least two other incarnations - one as a PlayStation 2 title - it has re-emerged in North America in 2008 as a budget-priced console-to-computer port. Race over.ĭrive to Survive is a top-down combat racer that is as erratically odd as its pedigree is convoluted. Though the camera eventually does catch up, the brief disappearing act sends you off a bridge.
Does the road turn right, or left? Is there an obstacle just in front of you, or not? And then, just as you think things couldn't get any weirder, your car drives completely off the edge of your monitor. Indeed, your car is so close to the edge that you can scarcely see what lies ahead. But this is far worse: now, as you pull farther in front of your rivals, and as the camera strains to fit the entire, expanding pack onto the screen, you come perilously close to reaching the edge of that screen. How it zooms in and out seemingly at will, and how you can't - at all - change to another camera. You noticed earlier how it morphs occasionally from true overhead to a chase view and back again. So far, so good.īut what's this? The overhead camera is behaving very oddly. You've driven smartly, gently nudged one of your competitors to a flaming death over the edge of a towering cliff, let loose on another with a blast of machine gun fire, and kept your car pointed in the right direction despite slipping and sliding on a road so covered with ice you could play hockey on it. So there you are, at the head of the pack.