Burnout Drift 2: Hilltop

Summary

Burnout Drift 2: Hilltop gives you two and a half minutes to build the biggest drift score you possibly can, but your cash isn’t safe until you’ve banked it. By throwing down consistent angles and staying out of trouble, the multiplier soon reaches 10x. But if you leave it too late and smash into a wall (or an innocent commuter), your current score will be reset to zero.

The handling has enough weight transfer, body roll, and throttle sensitivity to reward proper drifting without turning into a hardcore simulator. Countersteering has a big impact, short handbrake taps can rescue understeer, and carrying too much angle uphill drains the speed from the heavier vehicles (and there are some real chonky bois in the roster).

You get to explore three mountain-road stages with wildly different weather scenarios. Summer Rolling is bright and forgiving, Ridge hides the traffic in rain and darkness, and Winter Pass gives your car a little less grip, making the downhills even more challenging. All three use the same basic solo score-run structure, but the weather and visibility change how confidently you’ll attack them.

Throw in the awesomely varied 12-car garage, unlimited free suspension tuning, fun camera angles, and surprisingly detailed graphics options, and Hilltop still feels substantial for an old-school browser game.

It isn’t the easiest game for those looking to get started with the basics of drifting, but once the physics start making sense, you’ll understand why it’s still one of the most popular drifting games today.

Features

• Release date – July 2017
• Difficulty – Intermediate/Advanced
• Levels/environments – 3
• Number of vehicles – 12
• Vehicle customization/upgrades – Customization/tuning only
• Multiplayer – No
• Mobile – No
• Developer – BoneCracker Games

Physics

Hilltop sits in the sim-cade middle ground. It feels closer to Forza Horizon or CarX Drift Racing Online than to more serious simulator games like Assetto Corsa.

There’s plenty of realistic-feeling weight transfer (especially with the heavier American vehicles), and countersteering makes a real difference, along with scoring that lets you off for running the walls (and cars) cleanly.

The cars all feel really different when you’re behind the wheel. The free classic Mustang starter car rolls more through transitions, while the shorter-wheelbase options like the BRZ feel planted and change direction faster. Stiffening the suspension can calm some of the Mustang’s movement, but it certainly won’t magically transform it into a Miata.

When you’re sideways, the steering angle stays where you set it (which will feel familiar to Drift Hunters MAX fans), so relaxed drifting where you’re just lifting the throttle and making small corrections works better than constantly fighting the wheel.

Hard impacts wipe your active, unbanked score (top right), but the run continues. The cars collect dents when you do bash into things, with the occasional fairly ordinary crash somehow bending the entire roof. If that gets you wanting something with more realistic damage physics, be sure to check out Car Crash Test: Abandoned City, which offers soft-body crumpling with shattered glass, plenty of crushers, ramps, slow motion, and drivetrain switching.

Graphics

The settings are surprisingly customizable for an older browser game. You can choose low, medium, or high textures, then toggle bloom, motion blur, lens flares, ambient effects, anti-aliasing, and shadows.

Starting at medium and adding effects gradually is the sensible route on a lower-spec computer (this one isn’t mobile-friendly, unfortunately).

High settings hold up well if your device can handle it, particularly inside the detailed first-person cockpits and across Ridge’s wet reflections. When you’re not hunting down a high score, press C to cycle through the selection of in-car and cinematic cameras.

Controls

PC/laptop/Chromebook

• W/Up arrow – Accelerate
• S/Down arrow – Brake/reverse
• A/Left arrow – Steer left
• D/Right arrow – Steer right
• Space – Handbrake
• Hold G – Slow motion
• I – Ignition
• Left Shift – Gear up
• Left Ctrl – Gear down
• C – Change camera
• L – Low-beam headlights
• K – High-beam headlights

My preferred setup is keeping my left hand on Space and the right hand on the arrow keys. It keeps the handbrake ready for a quick tap when you need to kick the backend out a bit more.

While this game isn’t available on mobile devices, we’ve got plenty more options that play smoothly on iOS and Android mobiles and tablets.

How to Play Burnout Drift 2: Hilltop

Initial Setup

The top-left settings menu controls the sound, music, textures, and individual graphics effects.

Your cash balance and the option to earn free coins by watching an ad sit at the top right.

Press ‘Play’ to enter car selection, where arrows cycle through the garage and separate controls open paint, wheels, suspension, headlight color, and tire-smoke color.

Suspension changes are free, so there is no reason to leave the starter Mustang untouched if its body roll bothers you. You can also choose from three free paint colors initially.

Once you’ve made your preferred tweaks, press ‘Save’ to keep the setup, then ‘Go’ to choose from the three levels (all unlocked from the start): Summer Rolling, Ridge, or Winter Pass.

Getting Started

Each run lasts two and a half minutes. The left side of the HUD holds your banked score, coins, and remaining time, while the right shows the active drift score and multiplier. The three-star targets are displayed on the right, along with their 25,000, 50,000, and 100,000-point goals.

Once you start consistently drifting, you’ll see the multiplier begin to climb. If you’re not yet confident, but want to ensure you get a decent payout, you can drive without getting sideways for a few seconds, and your active score moves safely into the bank.

Gentle wall contact is usually tolerated, but ramming into a solid barrier or the traffic (driving on both sides of the road) removes whatever is still active. Near misses and wall runs don’t add separate bonuses. You’re purely rewarded for hard driving, clean transitions, and big, sustained angles.

If you fancy another game with traffic and realistic weight transfer without repeating the timed format, RealDrive is a great alternative, offering drift challenges, highway racing, police chases, and missions across cities, highways, garages, and docks.

Finding your device is struggling to play this one smoothly? The classic Drift Hunters game is the best lightweight option. You get great physics, mobile support, 26 cars, quick unlock pacing, and much more in the way of tuning and upgrades.

Once you get used to the handling, you’ll get a solid payout for impressive runs. I scored around 395,000 points in the starter car and received nearly 40,000 cash. One thing to note – the cash counter takes its time to count after a big score, but you can just restart or return to the menu, and the money will still be added.

While Hilltop improves the weather, interiors, and two-way traffic, the original Burnout Drift has more varied locations. Its open Port is a much better learning space if you’re struggling to get to grips with the vert changes, with forested Rocky Pass and steep Night Desert offering even crazier elevation variation than Hilltop’s near-identical mountain routes.

Track List

Summer Rolling

This is the best starting point and the ultimate track for farming cash. Daylight makes the road, traffic, and barriers clear and easy (as they can be) to predict. It’s ideal for understanding the grip levels and how your vehicle reacts with elevation changes.

Ridge

While it’s a similar layout to Summer Rolling, Ridge is dark, wet, and much more unforgiving.

The rain streaks and reflections look awesome, but there’s long sections with little street lighting, and roadside signs poke slightly into the road, which can clip the rear-end if you’re not careful.

At times, you’ll see lightning flashes that briefly reveal the next corner just as an oncoming car enters it, which looks great but is the perfect way to ruin an unbanked 10x combo!

Winter Pass

A cold snap covers the landscape in snow and adds a frozen effect to the screen. The grip isn’t dramatically lower than Summer Rolling, but you will notice it, so the stage sits between the other two in difficulty. At first glance, you’ll expect the car to be skating everywhere, but it’s just slightly less than the normal, fairly low-grip handling this game provides.

All three roads use rolling elevation, barriers, and wider-than-usual touge-style corners. If you’re after an even tougher challenge, Touge Drift & Racing takes the Japanese mountain road concept even further with harsh, narrow routes, an AE86 starter, timed grip-or-drift runs, and separate staged Race and Drift builds.

If snow, touge roads, and JDM cars are the attraction here, you’ll definitely want to check out Drift Hunters Pro, which adds mobile support and online multiplayer tandem lobbies.

Car List

You start with zero cash and the classic Mustang, then unlock the remaining 11 cars through drift earnings:

• Classic Ford Mustang fastback – Free
• Shelby GT500 – 25,000
• Subaru BRZ – 35,000
• Nissan 370Z – 50,000
• Dodge Ram SRT-10 – 70,000
• BMW E92 M3 – 90,000
• Ford F-150 SVT Raptor – 115,000
• Chevrolet Camaro – 130,000
• Toyota Supra MKIV – 150,000
• Lamborghini Gallardo – 175,000
• Ferrari 458 Italia – 225,000
• Bugatti Veyron – 300,000

The list offers a great variety of sensible drift choices, muscle cars, pickups, and supercars (with rear-wheel-drive conversions, of course!). Early on, cheaper drift cars like the BRZ are a great purchase as it’s much shorter and more agile than the Mustang.

There’s no El Camino (that we enjoyed in the original) this time, unfortunately. However, the Ram SRT-10 and F-150 Raptor are welcome quirky additions, even if they both need a little more patience uphill. The Ram in particular feels like it’d benefit from a 2JZ swap and a proper angle kit!

If building cash is your goal, focus on the more “typical” drift cars initially. Then, purchase the more unusual options (like the pickups) when you’re looking for chilled-out fun with the cinematic cameras and slow-mo modes later on.

Tuning & Customization

Tuning

Free front and rear adjustments cover camber, spring force, ride height, and damping. Increasing suspension stiffness can reduce body roll on the less nimble cars, while camber and ride height help bring badly fitting aftermarket wheels back toward the fenders (no offset, though, I’m afraid!).

Like the original, the camber sliders are reversed. Moving the slider toward positive produces negative camber, so use your mouse to move around your car and check out the angle. There’s no performance tuning, which would help the heavier vehicles on the uphill sections.

For a (much) bigger mechanical playground, head over to Force Drift Racing: Aussie Burnout. You get 23 vehicles, a huge selection of upgrades and customization, and separate Burnout, Drift, and Showcase game modes. Its real drift circuits and Summernats-style burnout pit provide the variety Hilltop’s single-score format leaves out.

Visual Customization

The first three paint colors are free, and the six premium colors cost 1,000 each.

The expansive wheel selection costs 1,500 per set (but some vehicles block aftermarket wheels entirely). Be careful if you’re trying to preview how they look, as clicking any of them purchases and fits them immediately.

Some choices will produce hilariously diabolical fitment, and the missing offset slider means camber and ride height have to do the rescue work before the car reaches Kyle Mohan Miata territory. (If you know, you know.)

RGB sliders let you tweak the headlight and tire-smoke colors, while ‘Save’ keeps the setup and ‘Reset’ returns the car to stock. Compared with the original Burnout Drift, Hilltop drops the vinyls, underglow, 14 wings, and the police light bar.

Advanced Tips & Tricks

Consider banking your cash before the traffic makes you regret it

Keeping an active 10x combo is tempting, and the potential payout is huge, but it stays vulnerable until you drive straight for a few seconds. This is especially true on the harder-to-see tracks like Ridge, where darkness and oncoming traffic can kill a large score before you have time to react.

Tap the handbrake instead of holding it

A short Space tap helps rotate the rear of the car when it begins to understeer (which you’ll soon see!). Holding it usually adds too much rotation and scrubs off the momentum, so tap the e-brake, steer, and get back on the throttle to step it out.

If you want to understand advanced drifting techniques, why not learn from your favorite pros and YouTubers with our ultimate selection of free drifting video tutorials. From Keiichi Tsuchiya to Chelsea DeNofa, there’s something for everyone.

Practice lifting the throttle and letting the car carry itself

The starter Mustang has enough power to stay sideways downhill without requiring full throttle (or any throttle at all, quite often). Practice lifting off the throttle occasionally, keeping the steering angle steady, and let the momentum carry the car before making another correction.

Constantly tapping the left and right steering arrows usually creates more work rather than opting for a more controlled approach like the pros.

Opt for less angle uphill in the heavier cars

Heavy American options like the pickups lose speed quickly on the (near-constant) climbs because their fixed power has more mass to move. Use a shallower slide while still keeping it slightly sideways and prioritize momentum until the road tips downhill again.

Use Summer Rolling for farming cash early-on

The clear daylight and readable corners make Summer Rolling the ideal place to build long combos compared to the others. Once you’ve unlocked some of your favorite rides, Ridge and Winter Pass are both fantastic for challenge and atmosphere rather than efficient grinding.

Burnout Drift 2: Hilltop FAQ