I was not aware of the controversy on this title, but saw it on Steam's latest releases for $1.79USD and thought it looked interesting enough to pick up and try out.

Palm Trees, Neon Lights, and Synth-Wave in an endless runner style car game: OutDrive is perhaps unfairly compared to Power Drive 2000.

I admit I've not heard about Power Drive 2000, and I grabbed OutDrive because it was cheap and I liked the visual styles and music used in it. Since I have no real investment in either and feel that the whole theft of aesthetics issue is a load of bollocks, let's just look at OutDrive on its own.

The game starts with a deliberately grainy VHS influenced video of The Guy and The Girl. While standing outside of A Club some of The Goons shoot at The Guy and The Girl. The Guy fires back and The Goons all die. In the firefight, The Girl is shot and about to die. To save her, The Guy hooks The Girl up to The Car ... Hang on, The car is called DENVER, named after the developer... So The Girl is hooked up to DENVER and The Guy has to drive really really fast to keep her heart running.

It sounds like a load of nonsense (and is), but I did like the animation style used in this intro and that the man and woman are nameless. There's some additional forgettable story, and you are dropped right into the game world ready to keep her heart alive and running as long as you can. Except...

To be really honest, the game fell apart immediately. The default controls are absolutely horrible and there is no ingame way to remap them (at time of writing). You control the car with WASD and have a Heart-Life meter is linked to the car boost, which is set to Left-Shift.
Since you must keep the meter value in a certain range, and that it keeps falling like a more understandable version of GAUGE, it was really hard to control the car and keep the meter up.

Eventually I found that the launch window allows key remapping, but no matter what you change 'Heart/Boost' too I found Left-Shift still was the only way to keep the heart meter up. This really needs fixing and will hopefully appear in a future patch.
After spending longer than I usually would I remapped car controls to the arrow keys, and left Heart/Boost and Break as they were.

As mentioned you have to drive to keep your partner alive, balancing speed as you race as to not get too slow for too long, or driving too fast for too long. Both of these will end the race. Finding the right balance of acceleration to the Heart meter is key to surviving.

This is also one of the few games where I've enjoyed Drifting. Normally I find this a totally stupid concept in racing games (much preferring Rally style). Once I had a decent keymap running, drifting in this was not only easy to pull off, it helped to break up the long stretches of roads and light corners.

As you race, you'll basically have the road to yourself. I didn't encounter any actual traffic to race against and avoid, but the game is not without obstacles.

Ever so often, you'll encounter road-wide ramps that can drain your speed if you hit the ground and lose control of the car. There's also blockades with a much more narrow ramp you have to hit, and while there's no collision damage by hitting a car that forms blockade, it will dramatically reduce your speed and you'll need to reverse and try to slip over it, or drive in the opposite direction and take it again before the heart meter stops. It is not something you can blast your way through.

Much more rarely an attack chopper would appear and shoot at you with bullets and missiles. Neither appear to do any actual damage directly, however the missiles can damage some of the environment and loosen a lot of debris you have to avoid. Driving for long enough and the helicopter will explore, I'm guessing The Guy is shooting it too from his invincible car with life support.

The real appeal of the game is the fantastic 80s style Retro/Synth-wave soundtrack. Little popups appear that let you know what the track is while playing, if you want to risk paying attention to it, but it is better to follow the link on the main menu.

I'd really like to see an OST release of this at some point. Stick it up on Steam or Bandcamp (or Loudr or whatever you kids are using nowadays).

The game does need some optimisation and does have some faults. I had to run it in a window as the resolution settings were not applying correctly, and key-remapping does need to be able to be set as permanent. There's also a rarely encountered pause in the game while racing, I'm guessing as it is loading level data. While it didn't hit me at any point crucial, this really needs to be fixed in a genre where you need it to be smooth.

Ignore the fuckery with Power Drive 2000's fans, they're not doing the makers of that game any favours. For $1.79 Outdrive is a nice little title to spend some time with, and hopefully the minor issues will be fixed soon.

Game Acquisition: Purchased on Release
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Thread: 1 - 24 February 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009

OS: Windiws XP
Processor: i3
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: GTX560
DirectX: Version 9.0
Storage: 1 GB available space