Sure, bears can’t drift, but that never stopped a bandicoot in Crash Team Racing or Donkey Kong in any Mario Kart game. Stereotypes are meant to be broken, but Bears Can’t Drift!? is more inclined to just be a good time than break down barriers of race and species. The four player cart racing game offers plenty of fun with people, but lacks many of the mechanics that encourage playing by yourself.
There’s a simplicity to Bears Can’t Drift!? which most games often refuse to try to attain for many reasons. When you start up the game, you’re dropped onto a race track and pick the difficulty for your play session by simply driving through either the left, right or center of a track. The center is the easiest difficulty as you drive straight to your entrance, while the left side is the normal difficulty, and the right side is the more difficult one entailing drifting and falling off a cliff to reach the same destination as the others. Already I was smitten with the game’s interesting decision to remove a menu to select the difficulty.
Then you get to a hub world which allows you to pick between three different environments, each with multiple tracks to race on. Then those multiple tracks have three different game modes to participate in, each cycled through by simply pressing a button. You might think it’s weird for me to be focusing so heavily on something as simple as not having menus, but it is one of the game’s unique charms and helps keep things streamlined.
Unfortunately, the game streamlines a bit too much. By having three game modes for each track, tracks don’t always feel customized for a specific mode. There are your traditional races, time trials, and then a Picnic mode where you aim to collect as many pieces of food as possible by finding it on the track or taking it from players. The problems arise in that Picnic mode is designed as a form of the traditional battle arena. It felt like lots of tracks were designed for this mode and so, when you go into modes like Time Trial or Race, you can wind up falling off the course fairly easily. Mind you, this encourages drifting more but that leads me to my next complaint – the drifting isn’t particularly fun.
For a game called Bears Can’t Drift!?, you’d think that the drifting would be fun, but while it is insanely simple (the mantra for this game, it seems), it’s also not very effective. You can’t always see over a hill where you might fly off, but there was probably a turn right after the mound that required you to drift a bit. You didn’t see it though, and now you’re off the map completely. Sometimes you even see that a drift is necessary but you don’t quite realize how long to drift before you’re bouncing off a wall. It’s a problem with the environment design that finds its poor designs reverberating throughout the different game modes.
Fortunately, the game is pretty. It doesn’t have a very distinct soundtrack to it, but it’s visually scrumptious. Running on Unreal Engine 4, the game is reminiscent of N64-era 3D platformers like Banjo Kazooie or Donkey Kong 64 in its art style. The way the hub worlds work is also akin to those games, but it only goes as far as that. I feel a lot of the game’s style is unique, and I would definitely look forward to seeing more games in this aesthetic. But if it’s a cart racing game, it will need to be willing to sacrifice some of its simplicity for a more engaging experience.
Even when competing in a race, the game doesn’t really penalize players for losing, meaning they don’t really feel any stakes. That’s a significant thing to opt out of doing. The game will reward players for doing well, but doing poorly is never punished. The worst you’ll get is frustration, which you can find in other aspects of the game already. Take, for example, the weapons, which are your standard cart racing weapons, but with different skins more tied to the bear theme. Weapons are interesting because you can combine them to create more powerful weapons as well, but there is still room for more compelling types.
It’s all fine in the name of warfare though, and that is where Bear’s Cant Drift!? shines. Specifically local warfare (there is no online support, which is a bummer) where the game will let three other players including yourself drop in for some competitive action. That’s when it starts to get hectic, and the multiple weapons come into play to create havoc for other players. It’s a fun time and easily the best part of the game.
If you’re looking for a really good single player experience though, Bears Can’t Drift!? will not offer you that. It is clearly designed around having local multiplayer, which explains many of the decisions regarding environment design and its simplicity. No need to toy around with a bunch of settings, just pick up and play. It’s a novel idea on the surface, but you realize what costs it comes with and immediately recognize the reason for some complexity.