Hot Rod: American Street Drag

Hot Rod: American Street Drag is a drag race simulator in which you start with a tin can of a car and make your way to V8 powered monsters. The game dates back from the stone age, circa 2003, so don’t expect too much from it when it comes to looks.

At the start of the game, you get a nice little sum of money to invest in one of the six cars that are available at Big Daddy’s vehicles. None of them shine in any way but no matter what, you have to pick one and make it work. Later on you can purchase others out of the 20 that are available.

Once you pick your deathtrap, you enter the garage where you can see what parts are either breaking down or have already disintegrated due to drag racing abuse. If you have the spare parts, swapping the bad with the new is done in a matter of seconds, and you can quickly get back to racing.

Each race you win gets you cash and reputation, the first enables you to stock up on new and better parts while the latter opens up opportunities to race against better drivers. Hot Rod: American Street Drag manages to capture the essence of how drag racing works and how much it costs.

In Hot Rod: American Street Drag you won’t have to worry about sharp turns, it’s all about perfect shifting and keeping the powerful car on the track. We all know how easy it is for a dragster to crash and disintegrate into a thousand pieces and in this game you have to make sure those kinds of events are avoided.

Visually, like we’ve mentioned, it’s an old game but if you don’t mind the low-res graphics it might turn out to be a good experience. The game provides a few nice features to make things ‘realistic’, such as the front of the car popping up thanks to rear-wheel drive, or the presence of motion blur when the car reaches high speeds.

On a closing note, Hot Rod: American Street Drag is a decent game if you’re looking for a drag racing simulator. It looks rather bad by today’s standards, but gameplay is rather enjoyable.