Top Drives: The best game you've never played #BlogPost

Introduction

So what is Top Drives? Top Drives is a free card based game developed by British Developer (woot) Hutch Games for Android and shudder… iOS. The game revolves around winning, upgrading and racing cars in a variety of scenarios on various different surfaces such as asphalt, gravel, dirt, sand, snow and ice. It can also be raining which will have an effect on the outcome aswell, rain can be on any surface type. It’s kind of like a who would win scenario, a low grip car with fast acceleration? or a high grip car with low acceleration? The game features many different brands with a very long car list, at the time of writing the game has 723 different cars with a giant Porsche update on the horizon.

How the game works

Now, when it comes to gameplay, there’s a twist; you don’t actually control the cars, you assign five cards from your garage to your hand and then assign one car to each race, depending on the opponent, surface or race type. Race types are: 1/4, 1/2 1 mile drag, speed bowl, twisty road, twisty track, fast circuit, karting circuit, city streets, motorcross track, slalom test and hill climb. Once the race has been set up you then watch the race and see the results, winning a race awards 50 points, but if you absolutely destroy them after a few seconds your points will start to tick up, and will do so until your opponent finishes or gets stuck and is unable to complete the race (think 70’s muscle car on twisty dirt road)

Campaign

The game does have a single player mode with plans for expansion soon, it’s what you’d expect, races earn stars that unlock new regions to progress. Each region has it’s own races with different surfaces and race types, so the USA is mostly drag racing while Abu Dhabi is mostly offroading on sand. Each region has it’s own boss race and once the boss is defeated you win their car as a prize.

Car Cards

Now onto car cards, they can be attained by either winning them from races or from packs, i’ll explain packs later on. They have a level (up to 30 in the next update), a rank which dictates what colour is on the card, the car levels are:

• Common - Grey
• Uncommon - Green
• Rare - Blue
• Super Rare - Yellow
• Ultra Rare - Red
• Epic - Purple
• Legendary - Orange

The cards most important stats are on the right side, the most important of them being grip and acceleration for most situations. You can tap on the card to flip it over to view more detailed stats but they’re not too important, the four on the front matter most. Although ride height is quite important but can only be viewed on the flip side, if a ride height is below medium your car will slow down to a crawl on City Streets because of some speedbumps which can be devastating in tight races. Moving on, the tyre type is also present below the car image which is also a very important factor, you have standard, performance, all surface, off road and slicks but slick tyre vehicles are very rare. Different tyres are good for different things, Standard being good for all round racing and they don’t have much traction loss on wet surfaces, Performance being very good for on road racing but suffer great traction loss on wet surfaces, All Surface tyres are essentially the best tyres for all round racing, losing almost no traction off road and in the wet, Off Road tyres lose no traction off road but don’t have much on asphalt which gives them a huge edge in off road events but Off Road tyre vehicles are quite rare and finally, Slick tyres, these seem to be the rarest in the game, I can only think of a few cars that have them but from what I know they are the best tyres for on road racing (obviously) but are useless in rain and off road tracks.

Vehicle Upgrades

You can upgrade your cars in three areas, engine, weight, chassis, each one affects the car in different ways. Engine increases acceleration and top speed, Weight increases all stats by a mild amount and Chassis increases grip. You purchase upgrades in tiers of three, when you have three upgrades fitted to one area you need to fuse cards of either the same type or one type below to unlock the next tier. You can only fit 24 upgrades to your car however, meaning that you can max out all but one of your cars stats (e.g: Engine 3.3 Weight 3.3 Chassis 2.3)

Packs

Now onto packs, you win cars by either winning or buying packs with gold or cash. There are five main different types of packs, Plastic, Steel, Aluminium, Ceramic and Carbon Fibre. Packs give out five cards, one of which will be a good card for that pack (e.g Ceramic gives five cards with at least one being Super Rare). Carbon Fibre packs can only be bought with gold but the rest can be attained with in game cash. There are many types of packs, you can get packs for different regions, fuel type, drive train etc. Packs can also be won from levelling up and completing events with varying rewards.

Multiplayer / Events

Multiplayer (now rebranded as events) is racing against people’s scores set on events that appear daily, the game has a leaderboard rewards system which rewards players in different score zones with different prizes which usually consist of money, gold and a pack but with some special events cars are given out aswell. Unfortunately, the games event system features a ticket system which works in the same way as gas does on racing games such as CSR2. You can only have five tickets at a time which I suppose helps balance the game and prevents people with overpowered hands from cleaning up but it’s more of an annoyance, especially since it takes 30 minutes to regenerate one ticket.

Not every game is perfect

Top Drives like everything good has it’s fair share of flaws, for example the packs are overpriced for what they give, if i’m paying 32000 cash for a ceramic I expect every card to be Super Rare or more, not just one of them, the gas system also applies to individual cars which can be very, very irritating but can be forgiven because you can simply use another hand while they regenerate but high level cars such as my Legendary McLaren 12c take forever to regenerate one use. The game also forces some packs to be bought with gold or even cash with the limited time offer starter pack to give new players a boost early on. Another flaw with the game is the upgrade system on later cars, it’s much harder to find cards worth fusing for a Legendary car than it is for a Rare car and as a result, 99% of Legendary cars stay in a 1.3, 1.3, 1.3 upgrade state. I’m sure many of the game’s issues will be addressed later on but for now, we can enjoy the game in it’s current state as most of my complaints are nitpicks at best.

Final Word & download links

Top Drives is a genuinely good, severely underappreciated game and I cannot wait to see what the future holds for the game. Hopefully more people will begin to see it for the amazing game it is and the potential it holds, thanks for reading.

Android Download

iOS Download

This was my first blogpost, I hope it was a good read and you enjoyed it, took about 2 hours to write out in my College free periods
-Elliot.R34