When I’m reviewing games, the hardest to evaluate tend to be the ones that hit their core gameplay well but provide a small amount of content. Usually, they promise more to come in updates, and Tail Drift (Free) is no different in that regard, but most people who have been gaming on mobiles for a while know that promise isn’t always one a developer can keep, so you can’t count on that. At the moment, Tail Drift is a sweet piece of cotton candy. You pop it in your mouth, get a momentary hit of pleasure, and before you know it, it has dissolved. I think at the price it goes for, that’s not really a raw deal, but there are so many games on the App Store that will offer you bigger bang for your buck, especially in the highly-competitive racing genre.

Tail Drift is an airplane racing game, sort of. You don’t fly freely, but rather are attached to a tube that winds its way through the course. You can rotate all the way around the tube, and there are boosts and sometimes items along the way that you really ought to hit. If you hit most of those boosts, you’ll probably achieve the three-star rank on whichever goal the event is asking for, and if you miss them all, you’ll most likely fail the event and have to try again. There are coins on the track, but you’ll earn them largely from winning events, and you can use them to upgrade your plane or buy a new one. The stars you earn can be used to unlock new events or open up treasure boxes containing coins. In total, the game features 18 different events across two leagues. Each league has three different tracks, and there are three different event types. Basically, you get one of each type of event on each track, and that’s the lot for now.

There are standard races where you square off against several computer-controlled opponents, with the aim being to place at least third in order to advance, with each place higher earning you one extra star. Then, you have time challenges, where you need to get a certain minimum lap time, with additional goals for more stars. Finally, there are time extension races, where you have to reach a certain distance before time runs out. In these races there are special gates placed around the track that will give you an additional five seconds if you go through them correctly. The first type of race is the only one where weapons come into play, with the other two focused completely on running the best line through the various tracks.

All in all, it’s a brief jaunt to clear everything, or it would be if you could just proceed directly from event to event. Once you reach the second league, the challenge steps up and you’ll likely need a fully upgraded plane to win the events, and the coins you earn through regular play aren’t nearly enough to allow you to do that. You’ll have to go back to earlier races and do a little extra grinding, which is kind of a bummer because after you’ve bought a couple of upgrades, previous races become trivially easy. I can see why the developer felt the need to pad the experience, but it’s not very subtle at all. Even with that, the game only offers up about an hours’ worth of content at best. Even if you decide you want to round out your full collection of planes, there are only four in total to collect. Fully upgrading all of them would probably take a while, at least, unless you took advantage of the game’s IAP to give your coin total a little bump. I can’t see why you would, because you’ll eventually have tons of coins with nothing to spend them on, but you could.

That said, a racing game doesn’t really need a lot of content if what it does is done well enough. Though we’ve gorged on excess since Gran Turismo shattered standards more than 15 years ago, one need only look to the excellent Daytona USA and its meager three tracks and single car to know that racing can get by on very little. Like most decent racing games, if you get into trying to shave seconds off your times or nudge out your buddies on Game Center, I’m sure you’ll get a lot out of Tail Drift. It’s enjoyable to play and the tracks are substantial enough to keep things competitive on the leaderboards. I still ended up feeling a bit unsatisfied, though, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, there’s not a lot of depth to the gameplay itself. There’s no acceleration or braking, only left and right movement, controlled by your choice of tilt, virtual buttons, or an MFi controller. You just need to make sure you don’t hit any solid obstacles and try to touch every boost pad. It’s simple, easy to control, and fun enough, but there’s no sense of mastery about controlling your craft. It’s more about memorizing where the boosts are on each track and making sure you are in the right places at the right time. The game leans heavily into track mastery, which is a fine enough peg to hang your hat on, but this hits the second problem, which is that the current track selection doesn’t offer enough unique challenges to help each one stand out from the next. There’s visual distinction between them, to be sure, but the actual gameplay feels pretty well the same on the final track as it does on the first.

The weapons you can pick up during standard races help add to the fun, but here too, there isn’t quite enough to chew on. There are stun shots that come in packs of three and shoot straight forward, mines that drop behind you, and a boost item. I mean, if we’re cutting things down to the core, that’s all the important boxes checked, but a few more items couldn’t hurt, particularly since you’ll have a hard time landing stun shots due to how easily they can be dodged. Careful use can turn a race around, however, and enable you to clear races your plane might otherwise not be able to. That swings both ways, naturally, but the computer AI is pretty dense and has a lot of trouble hitting you if you move around a bit.

It’s at least a pretty game, with bright, colorful tracks that take place in varied locations. Your plane actually visually changes with each new upgrade, which is pretty cool. The music could do with a bit more variety, but what’s here is suitably bouncy and up-tempo to fit the theme. Thankfully, Tail Drift has Game Center support, with leaderboards for each event on each track. There aren’t any achievements to earn, but the leaderboards are infinitely more important in a game like this, and they end up being crucial to the game’s long-term appeal. As I said before, it’s mostly a matter of memorizing the tracks, but they’re long and winding enough that there’s plenty of room for error, and where there’s room for error, there is the opportunity for fine competition with other players. The game encourages this by incorporating the competition right into the event selection screen, with a crown displayed on the event if you have the best time among your friends.

Tail Drift isn’t a terribly deep game, and what’s here isn’t nearly enough to satisfy, but it has nice controls, good graphics, and an interesting theme, which is enough for it to make its mark, in my opinion. If you get a good group of people to play with, such as the fine people in the forum thread for the game, you’ll certainly have a lot of fun edging out each other’s times again and again. If you’re in it for pure solo consumption alone, it’s a bit harder to strongly recommend in its present form. You’ll assuredly get your money’s worth in fun out of its unusual premise and tight controls, but after you’ve run through the short list of events, there’s not much to keep you coming back.