Gaming has become a prohibitively expensive hobby. Home consoles are between $400 and $500 (if you can find one), gaming PCs are north of $1,000, and the games have gone from $50 to $60 to $70 for a full “Triple-A” game.

That’s a lot to invest, and not all who enjoy video games can cough up that amount of money for an experience that isn’t even guaranteed to be enjoyable.
In the past, we had the humble flash game as an alternative. A free game hosted on a website provided some enjoyment but was rarely an exciting experience.

But now, thanks to the Unity Engine and a few very clever developers, we have entire video game experiences that run right within a web browser, with no installation required. One of those games is the incredible free online drifting simulator game - Drift Hunters.

Drift Hunters is an entirely free, full 3D, Unity-based found within Drifted’s Car Games selection.

Thanks to its Unity foundations, it is super accessible, being able to run from any web browser with great performance. If you find that the game is running at a lower frame rate than you would like, it has three quality settings (low, medium, and high), allowing you to balance the fidelity and performance however you like.

Once you’re loaded into the game (it typically takes less than 30 seconds to start playing), you are presented with your main menu and your starter car, a humble Toyota Corolla AE86.

From the main menu, you can immediately jump into a track to start getting the hang of the controls, browse through the game’s 25 unlockable cars, look at the many upgradeable parts you can apply to your vehicle, or customize your car in a number of different ways.

This is where Drift Hunters sets itself apart from the free flash games that came before it. You have access to both a “Visuals” menu and a “Tuning” menu.

In the “Visuals” menu, you can customize the general look of your car. With an in-depth color selector, you can change the color of your car’s chassis and rims, and you can make that paint gloss, matte, metallic, or chrome. This will ensure that even if you’re running the same car like your friends, you can truly make it your own.

To further customize it, although, for more tangible performance reasons, you can enter the “Tuning” menu. Here, you can change your car’s camber, brake pressure, offsets, brake balance, and even height. All of these modifications serve to customize your car’s drifting ability to your liking.

Speaking of drifting, once your car is painted and customized, you are ready to hit one of the game’s many tracks. This is where the meat of Drift Hunters happens, as you learn to utilize the game’s very simple controls and master its realistic physics. It’s a game about learned skills, and just hitting the accelerator and hitting a turn at the last second is going to result in you slamming into a wall.

Learning how to drift in Drift Hunters will take time and patience, but is well worth the effort you put into it. For those having trouble getting the hang of it, the game’s page on Drifted.com has a number of very helpful guides including a beginner’s tutorial and a high score guide, as well as other learning materials that will help you to be successful in the game. Use all of these materials at your disposal to become a drifting force to be reckoned with!

In this day and age of expensive video games, super fun, free web games tend to get overlooked. But I’m here to tell you that Drift Hunters is a browser game that is well worth your time investment and can be just as much fun as any Triple-A racing game.

With the addition of the latest game in the series, Drift Hunters MAX, the future is bright for the Drift Hunters series, allowing drift fans to enjoy the ultimate drifting experience from home, school, or work, with saved game functionality to pick up where they left off.