Another free steam rhythm game? Oh you really do spoil us. XDRiVER is a rhythm game with all the styling of a futuristic racing game, the vibes indicate motorcycle racing, but the specifics don’t really matter too much because it’s ultimately a regular VSRG with some interesting scoring mechanics.
So, unlike most of the games I play, this game uses a lot more inputs. 9 to be specific. The game is broken into 6 lanes, but similar to Sound Voltex, there are some notes spanning the whole left or right hand which are bound to a different input. On PC, that is the two shift keys (accurate since they’re called “gear shift” inputs), and on controller, it’s the sticks.
Oh right, controller! Thats kinda novel, and I’m super bad at it lol. Instead of using a keyboard, with 1 finger for each column, you can use a controller, with each hand’s columns being bound to a face button, the bumper, and the trigger, so you still have 1 finger per input, except this time your hand is contorted in a weird way, which is super sucks for someone with really big hands that struggles with holding a controller with fingers on bumpers/triggers at the same time. I do have a small amount of controller play, but I couldn’t break out of the easy difficulty.
There is however a reason to play with a controller (specifically a switch procon, dualshock 4/5, or a steam controller or deck, but not an xbox controller): gyroscope input. Thats right, the 9th input I referenced above is the gyroscope. At certain points in the chart, you have to drift, and the way you do that is by literally tilting the controller left or right to steer the chart in that direction. If that poses an issue, or you’re on a keyboard, the game includes a built-in “auto-drift”, which does not invalidate your scores, but does give you a lower quality medal.
So about the scoring: This is a racing game. While you do have your regular ratings and score number normalised to a nice round number, and health bar requirement to actually pass the chart, like most other games, thats not what the leaderboards want. The leaderboards want medals, and medals are awarded for beating “EX Score” thresholds. Anyone who’s played a game like IIDX or Voltex knows what this means. In short, accuracy.
Accuracy is the name of the game here. There are 3 timing windows that maintain your combo, and two with the same name (which grants you 1,000,000 points if you hit them all in this range), but the one that matters is the little central window that awards max points towards your EX score. For people who want immediate feedback, the game does tell you whether you hit early or late, but the way it does it screws with my brain a bit: It tilts the judgement text left for early and right for late, once again calling back to the idea of motorcycle racing. However I’ve found that when the auto-drift fires, and the whole chart tilts, “flat” is really difficult to track for the judgement text, so my timing ends up drifting as well lol.
Each chart has a target EX score that is required to complete the race, and the time you hit this target is your race time. That means especially that you have to ace at least the first half of the chart to get the best race times. Each chart though also has a bronze, silver, gold, and platinum medal, as well as a staff ghost to beat, each of which being at a certain EX score requirement. Handily, your next medal can also be shown as a pacer that tells you how far behind or ahead of the medal score you are currently. If you are using auto-drift then you’ll get just the medal, but if you’re manually drifting with the gyroscope, then you’ll get a winged medal, indicating to the leaderboards that you’re not a coward like me lol.
The game is brand new, releasing only within the last week, so there is very little official content, but what is there is solid, and it looks like the game has a solid foundation for modding and custom charts, which is very nice to have at launch. The xdrv chart format takes a lot of cues from the stepmania chart format, so people familiar with the latter should have a pretty easy time figuring out the former (though I can’t find any documentation about how to control stage lighting >_>)
I don’t know how the devs are going to go about future content update, or polishing up the edges (the game is a brand new release in early access after all,) but what I’ve played, I’ve really enjoyed.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2636020 Free to play
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