Now here’s a game that’s brilliant, yet not for everyone. “Drive Fast Think Faster”. To the best of my knowledge this is the first offering from Zebra Games I’ve chosen to review (some of their previous efforts, notably “The Charge”, I decided did not meet my criteria on the quality side), but it impressed me.
Firstly, this game ramps up the difficulty, and quickly. Let’s just get that out of the way immediately. Just as some people probably tried “Aban Hawkins & the 1000 SPIKES” or a “PLATFORMANCE” game and quit the trial as being just too darn hard, some people are going to feel that way here too. But there are rewards for those who persist… presuming you have a knack for it.
The game has you changing a car’s colour between three of the Xbox’s face button colours (blue, red, and green; mercifully, yellow was not utilised, and that’s probably a good call given how hard it is) as it barrels down a course. But this is no “Electronic Simon”, you also have to manage physics as you drive too, landing jumps and such as you go. It’s a bit like “sin(Surfing)” meets “Bloc”. And if you don’t know Bloc, it’s one of the most underrated games in the XBLIG catalogue, so go read the review or download the trial now. It’s hard to believe I reviewed Bloc on Day 16, but I digress.
There’s a lot of course variety to “Drive Fast Think Faster”, from levels that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Atari’s classic “Stunt Drivin'” to tracks that look like a level out of a platformer. There are no checkpoints, so you must start over from scratch when you screw up enough to fall through the bottom tier of a course, which suggests to me that this was intended to be a punishingly hard game since the developer didn’t implement them despite taking the time to implement online high scores, but it’s definitely worth 80 Microsoft Points if you’re good enough to get through the 8 minute trial. If you can’t… well, maybe it’s not for you then.
Here’s what the developer (Zebra Games_0) has to say about the game:
“Can your brain keep up with your driving? (online highscores)”
Writings of Mass Deduction 