A few months back the Nintendo eShop had a good sale on old Sonic games and I took the chance to pick up some classics, as I never owned any Sega console. Amongst them was Sonic Drift 2, which prequel was only released in Japan apparently.

Released in 1995, I was expecting some sort of Mario Kart style racing game but what I really found was very disappointing... Granted, the SNES with Mode 7 graphics was way more powerful than what the Game Gear could ever dream of but Sonic Drift 2 was simply not well executed. In fact, it's nothing like a Mario Kart and instead it plays more F-1 Race for the NES, released back in 1984!

The game has several tracks with traps and power ups to attack your rivals, alongside 8 different characters with their own abilities and traits when it comes to speed, acceleration or handling. It all sounds nice and promising until one realise the controls are terrible and ruin the whole experience. The corners, like the rivals, pop up right in front of you out of nowhere, forcing you to rely on signs next to the road indicating where the following corner is going. Even F-1 Race was capable of delivering some sense of flow between corners 10 years earlier!

The game already had mixed reviews back in the day and has aged badly to the point I cannot find any good reason to recommend it to anybody nowadays.