Need For Speed World: Drift online for free

Super Mario Kart on the SNES was a racing gateway drug in our household in the 90s. We liked SMK. We LOVED SMK. All of us, me, my daughter and my son, mastered SMK. And we had a Playstation, so we turned to Need For Speed and many of its sequels to get that same joy of racing each other, togetherness as a family, etc.
I’ve become thoroughly disenchanted over not having a car of my own. I scour Craigslist for non-scams daily. Having never owned a Toyota, I’ve decided nonetheless when the Honda drivers attack, I will stand shoulder to shoulder with my Toyota brethren and sistren and win the battle of street racing supremacy, like in Initial D. In fact, I probably need to hunt down and buy a mid-late 80s Toyota racing machine, like the Toyota Corolla GT-S AE86, the infamous “hachiroku”.
Need For Speed World has an AE86. It’s an MMO (kinda). It’s free. And I’ve been playing it for hours.

Need For Speed World is an open world street racing game played simultaneously with hundreds of other people, whom you will probably encounter while exploring the vaguely Los Angeles-like city. If some Civic is getting all up on your tail, you can challenge them to a 1-on-1 race, or at any time join a queue for a multiplayer race. If you’d like to join a race for a specific course, racing hubs are scattered around the map where you can choose to race against NPC cars or other players.
Racing
Racing in races gains you experience, cash, and a random reward which could include otherwise locked car parts. Levels gain you special moves (like a free nitro boost at race start) and access to better cars, parts and tunings. WINNING these races gives you even better stuff.
Although the game hints at being compatible with a game controller, I could find no way to make mine work. My very first race was me sitting at the starting line pressing every button on the thing, hoping to see a twitch of anything on the car. Nothing. Hence the keyboard.
W-A-S-D, or the arrow keys, move the car around. You can’t strafe as far as I can tell. You CAN DRIFT, if you’re careful, by tapping the hand brake (the SPACE bar) while turning. You’ll have to take your finger off the W for a moment and understeer a bit to keep control… or just return to your garage and drop the front end and stiffen the suspension a bit so you can turn at speed without having to drift.
You’ll gain access to various power-ups, through racing, that can help your chances on the course. There’s the nitro boost, of course, the “traffic magnet” that attracts NPC cars to the car of your choice and so on. Playing against more experienced drivers means getting hit with every dirty trick they have at their disposal. Course knowledge is invaluable; knowing just when to push someone else against a sudden unavoidable barrier is a game changer.

Pursuit
Though racing is the heart of Need For Speed World, it’s hardly the only form of gameplay. There’s a daily exploration quest which involves driving around looking for checkpoints, and then there’s Pursuit.
There’s hundreds, thousands of police on patrol in NFSW City. They are more or less content to just let you do whatever you like. Drive on sidewalks. Destroy public property. Race at unsafe speeds. It’s NFSW City, stuff HAPPENS.
But collide with a cop car… bump a cop car… scratch the paint of a cop car… and you’re public enemy number 1, a menace to society. Every cop in the city wants you gone. Your job is to evade pursuit until the cops lose track of you. If you can manage that, you win, and gain xp and cash proportional to how long you kept them on the run, how many roadblocks you passed, spike strips dodged, cop cars tagged or totaled and so on. If you lose, you lose some cash. no big deal.
NFSW seamlessly generates an instance of the game world as you enter pursuit mode so you’re not interfering with other players as you play cop-and-mouse. It’s far too easy to anger a cop as you’re exploring the city, though.

There’s a cash shop where you can buy extended customization options to make your car a real danger on the road. I’m not certain you can obtain the special things through normal gameplay, so it could be an instance of paying to win, especially given the crudity of the control scheme costing you a lot of subtler strategies (for instance, every car in NFSW appears to be an automatic).
Nonetheless, there’s plenty of fun to be had racing against the game and against other players. Players tend to gather at particularly picturesque spots where you can admire each other’s paint jobs and take screen shots or engage in impromptu races. You’re not going to spend a hundred hours leveling up in NFSW, and there is no plot or story, it’s just online arcade-style street racing, for free, on your PC.
And that’s just what I was looking for.