Let me get this out of the way: This is one great racing game. It has good sense of speed, the items are a litle generic but work nicely, the AI is surprisingly fair (though on the hardest difficulty it does seem a little less so) and the challenge seems adequate for what it is. I understand the coplaint about there being too few tracks, but the mirror courses are -to me at least- different enough to count as bonafidenew tracks given the game's price. The tracks and planes look great considering how old the game is and it should playable on almost any computer worth gaming on. Finally, the single player has leaderboards so you could aim to beat other peoples times on a given track.

The game's single player mode has three types of events: there's the Power Race, which plays a lot like the plane parts of Diddy Kong racing where you can collect items and even stack them to use them against an opponent, the there's Survivor, where the last player in the race is knocked out after a certain amount of time until only one racer remains. and finally, there's Speed race, where boost rings are littered across the "tracks" and there are no items.

This is where I start having complaints about the game. The first is that there's no time trial, which to me would have extended the longevity of the game and seemed easy enough to implement (though I'll admit I am no programmer and I could be wrong about that). The second complaint is that there is no single race mode, meaning that that if you want t play survivor on a given track you have to first unlock the event on the single player mode and then find it. this one is more perplexing since they could have reused the online play interface for this.

Speaking of online play, I actually bought this game for me and like 5 friends with DLC and everything because basically 90% off. At the time I figured 15 bucks would last me about 5 hours and that would be that. However, you can tell by my time with the game that I ended u enjoying it for a longer time. Buyin multple copies was a god idea though because, truth be told, there's nobody online, besides my friends I only managed to find a full room once during a sale, so ideally you would schedule something in advance with your friends.

Knowing this, you can play the game with up to 7 other people on any of the tracks and game modes. the matches I had were a lot of fun but there is a bit of a risk of a runaway leader, meaning that once a person builds a small lead, it can become impossible to recover if other players don't notice this (or if you are just amazing). This is compounded by the fact that mines in this game are very powerful. Having said that, I think the skill ceiling of this game is fairly high and you'll be looking for ways to shave off seconds of your time constantly.

as for actual complaints on the MP front, I do have a few. the most important is that you can't easily change game modes or tracks when you host a game. I would have loved to be able to go from power race to speed race and to Deathmatch, but alas, such is life. My next issue is that there are no bots online. This would have made it so that games with two people would be ruined by the runaway leader problem.

The DLC adds either new beter planes or new MP modes (DM and TDM) depending in what you buy. the first DLC may feel a little pay to win since the new airplanes are GOOD, but it's very cheap and online is largely dead, so I didn't mind it. The second DLC adds an interesting game mode with new arenas to play it, and while I found it to be fun, I wish they had made more tracks and added time trials too.

I final gripe many people had in other reviews was that framerate was locked at 30 fps. I don't mind the game being locked to give everyone a level laying field, since I think that having better hardware is not that different than buying better gear, but if you are playig this for the single player and that bothers you, now you know.

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing Skydrift, and while I don't expect to play it a whole lot more than I have, I think I easily got my money's worth. I recommend it for the single player alone and also if you have friends that own the game because it's also fun online.