So what is Top Drives? Top Drives is a free card based game developed by British Developer (woot) Hutch Games for Android and shudder… iOS. The game revolves around winning, upgrading and racing cars in a variety of scenarios on various different surfaces such as asphalt, gravel, dirt, sand, snow and ice. It can also be raining which will have an effect on the outcome aswell, rain can be on any surface type. It’s kind of like a who would win scenario, a low grip car with fast acceleration? or a high grip car with low acceleration? The game features many different brands with a very long car list, at the time of writing the game has 723 different cars with a giant Porsche update on the horizon.
How the game works
Now, when it comes to gameplay, there’s a twist; you don’t actually control the cars, you assign five cards from your garage to your hand and then assign one car to each race, depending on the opponent, surface or race type. Race types are: 1/4, 1/2 1 mile drag, speed bowl, twisty road, twisty track, fast circuit, karting circuit, city streets, motorcross track, slalom test and hill climb. Once the race has been set up you then watch the race and see the results, winning a race awards 50 points, but if you absolutely destroy them after a few seconds your points will start to tick up, and will do so until your opponent finishes or gets stuck and is unable to complete the race (think 70’s muscle car on twisty dirt road)
Campaign
The game does have a single player mode with plans for expansion soon, it’s what you’d expect, races earn stars that unlock new regions to progress. Each region has it’s own races with different surfaces and race types, so the USA is mostly drag racing while Abu Dhabi is mostly offroading on sand. Each region has it’s own boss race and once the boss is defeated you win their car as a prize.
Car Cards
Now onto car cards, they can be attained by either winning them from races or from packs, i’ll explain packs later on. They have a level (up to 30 in the next update), a rank which dictates what colour is on the card, the car levels are:
- Common – Grey
- Uncommon – Green
- Rare – Blue
- Super Rare – Yellow
- Ultra Rare – Red
- Epic – Purple
- Legendary – Orange
The cards most important stats are on the right side, the most important of them being grip and acceleration for most situations. You can tap on the card to flip it over to view more detailed stats but they’re not too important, the four on the front matter most. Although ride height is quite important but can only be viewed on the flip side, if a ride height is below medium your car will slow down to a crawl on City Streets because of some speedbumps which can be devastating in tight races. Moving on, the tyre type is also present below the car image which is also a very important factor, you have standard, performance, all surface, off road and slicks but slick tyre vehicles are very rare. Different tyres are good for different things, Standard being good for all round racing and they don’t have much traction loss on wet surfaces, Performance being very good for on road racing but suffer great traction loss on wet surfaces, All Surface tyres are essentially the best tyres for all round racing, losing almost no traction off road and in the wet, Off Road tyres lose no traction off road but don’t have much on asphalt which gives them a huge edge in off road events but Off Road tyre vehicles are quite rare and finally, Slick tyres, these seem to be the rarest in the game, I can only think of a few cars that have them but from what I know they are the best tyres for on road racing (obviously) but are useless in rain and off road tracks.
