Mighty Motors

Summary

Take a trip back to the simpler days of browser gaming with this legendary drag racer. All you need to do is balance the rev needle in the green for a perfect launch, shift gears at the right moment, then choose when to blast your single shot of nitrous.

Career mode keeps revealing new races and letting you cause an upset in new cities as you defeat the local opponents, while Quick Race offers Easy, Medium, and Hard events when you want a quick payout for upgrades or a new ride.

Your earnings go toward filling the 12-car garage, buying five-stage performance upgrades, and adding paint, rims, or neon. Despite being 10 years old now (regrettably, I’m old enough to remember when it was new), it’s still one of the most requested browser drag racing games among Drifted fans.

The early races put two grocery-getter hatchbacks head-to-head (think local ricers yelling “VTEC YO!” out the window – sound familiar?). Later, the supercars waiting in the showroom can blast past 300 mph as city buildings blur and the nitrous throws a huge blue flame from the exhaust.

It’s easy to get the hang of and super addictive once the payouts start funding upgrades and new rides. The most expensive cars still take a fair bit of patience, though.

You’ll need to decide which models are worth upgrading and when to cut your losses, sell the current car, and move into something faster from the showroom. Get those calls right, and you can start calling yourself king of the streets.

Features

• Release date – May 4, 2016
• Difficulty – Beginner
• Levels/environments – 5+ maps
• Number of vehicles – 12
• Vehicle customization/upgrades – Five-stage performance upgrades, paint, rims, and neon
• Multiplayer – No
• Mobile – Yes
• Developer – Kizi Games

Physics

Each car accelerates automatically once you launch off the start line, and from there on it’s all about timing. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely zero drifting here (as you might have guessed!).

A perfect start requires the tacho needle to be positioned in the green zone when the lights change. Over- or under-revving doesn’t produce a glorious burnout, sadly. It just bogs down as if you tried to pull away in second gear, and you’ll need to desperately blast your nitrous to stand a chance of catching up (unless your opponent screws up too).

Faster cars make the needle rise even quicker, paired with a smaller optimal area, making it harder as you progress. Thankfully, the extra performance (and nitrous) can often help you recover more easily.

As you’d expect in the real world, short (quarter-mile) races favor lighter cars with impressive acceleration, while longer distances make top speed, power, and nitrous more important.

If you’re missing the sideways action, Drift Max Pro adds a quirky 180-degree drift halfway through each race where you’ll need to drive back to reach the finish. Its ten-level campaign and ten cars make it a fun (yet slightly odd) sideways twist on an otherwise near-identical concept.

Instead of settling for a drag/drift compromise, our drifting games put you in full control of every slide, with Drift Hunters MAX being by far the most popular pick among Drifted gamers. It features stunning graphics, nearly 40 cars to choose from, 13 tracks (and many more configs) with competition scoring, online leaderboards, and plenty of proper tuning.

Graphics

Every race uses the familiar old-school 2D side view. They’re not going to put up much of a fight against the best modern browser game offerings, but it’s more about the fun of reaching the finish line first.

The screenshots don’t really do any justice to how fast-paced the game feels later on, as the city buildings blur past as the speedo slices through the 300 mph marker, and you’ll feel like you’re in Back to the Future!

Controls

PC/laptop

• Left-click accelerator – Control revs before launch
• Left-click ‘Up’ gear flappy paddle – Shift up

Mobile/tablet (iOS/Android)

• On-screen accelerator – Control the revs before launch
• On-screen ‘Up’ gear flappy paddle – Shift up

There’s no steering to worry about, and there’s no downshift controls, either (although you might wish there were after a dodgy start!) The large touch inputs make it ideal for playing on your mobile alongside other short-session mobile games.

How to Play Mighty Motors

Initial Setup

The opening city map shows your current balance in the top left, starting at $0, with your level and a sound button in the top right. Four race locations are visible in the middle. Only one is available, marked ‘NEW’ and accompanied by a pointing hand that’s difficult to miss.

A cheerful female mentor appears at the bottom, offering tips and directing you toward the first event. Select ‘NEW’ to open Career Stage 1, where you can check the reward, race rating, and distance before clicking the flashing green ‘Race’ button.

Winning the tutorial opens four more Career events and a Quick Race option (blue stopwatch icon). It also unlocks the ‘Dealership’, ‘Upgrade’, ‘My Cars’, and ‘Stats’ buttons. The Stats screen tracks wins, total winnings, distance driven, and the number of cars you’ve owned.

Getting Started

Tap the accelerator quickly before the start to try and get the needle inside the green area when the lights change. Doing so earns a perfect launch.

As soon as the car moves, watch the shift indicator and press ‘Up’ as the needle reaches green. Blue means the shift was early, while red means you waited too long.

The progress bar at the top shows the status of both cars in relation to the finish line. Once Nitro is installed, its button appears on the left. Pressing it uses up the entire tank in one continuous burst, and it can’t be gradually emptied like some games. Don’t panic, though, since it refills automatically for the next race, but don’t hesitate to use it.

If you’ve enjoyed this one and want more popular browser drag racers, Drag Racing Club goes further with 25 cars, several race types, upgrades, cash rewards, and tiered Career progression.

Drag Racing Rivals also keeps the same optimal-rev launches, timed shifts, and nitrous decisions but provides a close-up, modern take on the action, with traction becoming a fresh element to contend with.

Game Modes and Career Progression

Career

Career events show their distance, rating, and reward before you enter. Green icons show the easier opponents, with yellow and (later) orange rivals adding harder races as you advance.

Winning reveals more events and eventually lets you travel to new cities in your quest for global dominance. I visited five cities while playing, and it seemed there were even more to go.

Completed races stay on the map as smaller icons, and replaying them provides a reliable way to farm cash when you’re struggling to beat your next opponent. Early wins can pay around $200, while later events are several thousand.

Launch and shift multipliers, along with time, level, and customization bonuses, all increase the final amount. Losing still pays, too, so be sure to finish the run and keep chasing perfect shifts even when the rival is long gone.

Quick Race

Choose between Easy, Medium, and Hard difficulty levels. These events tend to be longer than the opening Career races, which makes Hard a rough choice with the stock “Blini” starter car. A rival would need to make a serious mess of things for you to steal the win!

Once you’ve installed a few upgrades, Medium events can pay around $1,000 after a strong run. That makes Quick Race useful when Career progress stalls, but defeating the unbeaten Career opponents should remain the main goal.

Players who want to take the underground street racing vibes further should check out NSR Street Car Racing. Its 50-car roster, open city, structured races, quick events, in-depth tuning, and real-time online play provide just about every major feature Mighty Motors leaves out.

Garage Strategy

‘My Cars’ shows your current rides, with their engine, gearbox, grip, weight, nitro, and overall rating. From there, you can move directly into the dealership, performance upgrades, or visual customization.

Upgrades

Performance is divided up into Engine, Acceleration, Wheels, Weight, and Nitro. Every category has five stages, with prices rising each time. The first Engine upgrade on the starter costs $150 and the second $200, but later cars charge way more for the same categories.

‘Auto Upgrade’ adds one stage across all five categories. If your Engine (for example) is already at Stage 2, Auto Upgrade moves it to Stage 3 while bringing the other four categories up by one stage.

Weight is the stat most likely to catch you out. The other numbers increase as the car improves, but a lower weight figure is better.

After Stage 1 of nitro (just to enable it), Engine and Acceleration will be the main early priorities for most. Weight and later-stage Nitro help too, but we’d let Wheels wait until the starter has enough power for grip to become a bigger concern.

Buy, Upgrade, or Sell

The free Blini 1.6LX can beat most early Career rivals with a few upgrades and clean shifting. It eventually becomes a sunk-cost trap. The $2,795 (amusingly named) OWLDI A7 TDi starts with much better base stats, so another expensive Blini stage may deliver less than saving toward the next car.

Upgrades don’t transfer between vehicles, but you can sell your old cars and recover some money. Better cars also charge more for paint, rims, neon, and performance parts.

Sometimes, a fully upgraded favorite is worth keeping. In other cases, a stronger stock replacement will beat it immediately, so make sure you look at the stats closely. 

For a game that lets you swap the streets for a highway, Racing Limits has the same warning about pouring money into a weak starter, then broadens the decision with 34 cars, adjustable gear ratios, suspension and camber, an 80-level Career, traffic, and real-time online racing.

Visual Customization

In the starter-car garage, Respray begins with three $100 colors, while another color and a livery unlock later. Available rims cost $75, and range from sensible aftermarket designs to a selection of bizarrely hilarious alternatives.

Some (initially locked) rims add a customization bonus to race payouts once they’re available and fitted.

Green, yellow, pink, and blue neon underglow cost $150 each on the starter, and a flashing multicolor option is initially locked.

That’s all there is here, but if that feels too limited, Top Speed Racing 3D lets you apply vinyls, wraps, camo, or respray with a full color palette on all 19 cars. Its open world also offers drifting, time trials, speed challenges, and parkour driving across city streets, an airport, docks, desert, and mountains. We’ve also got a huge selection of other car games if that doesn’t tick the right boxes

Car List

The dealership has 12 models on offer, (loosely) based on real-world vehicles. The names and profiles drop plenty of hints (see how many you can guess from the names!), although several inspirations remain open to debate.

• Blini 1.6LX – Free starter
• OWLDI A7 TDi – $2,795
• Merlindese V6 – $5,995
• AMW Z9 – $9,995
• Globus Esprit – $15,495
• Puma XMK V8 – $24,000
• Konstig Superleerer – $42,495
• Fellani F720 EX – $67,000
• Limbodani Taurus – $99,000
• Maclean P680 – $150,000
• Bugazzi Viron – $250,000
• Tykan Gigante – $500,000

The roster isn’t a clear fastest-to-slowest toss-up. A lightweight car with rapid acceleration is perfect for the quarter-mile, and a high-horsepower top-end-focused build will show its true capabilities over the longer races (and likely suck at the shorter ones!). You’ll need to pick wisely in the later stages, and consider having a specialist car for each event if you can afford to.

For something different with much less of a grind, games like Speed Racing Pro 2 provide a selection of 12 supercars for free from the beginning. Unlike Mighty Motors, the Veyron (replica, of course) is the fastest here. However, the Pagani and LaFerrari are more balanced and refined for twistier tracks where handling ability matters more than pure top speed.

Advanced Tips & Tricks

Balance the needle with quick taps at the start

Rapid accelerator taps make it easier to settle the needle inside the green launch area.

Applying too much throttle sends it past the target, while too little leaves the starter bogging down. You’ll soon see that a clean launch matters more than the rival’s aftermarket wheels and pop-bang exhaust!

Consider the distance before using your nitrous

I found third or fourth gear was usually the safer nitrous window in longer races, because the revs climb more gradually. A short race, on the other hand, may require you to use it almost immediately off the line.

If you have a poor launch, or a fast-disappearing rival, consider an early burst to get the revs up and stand a chance of making a comeback.

Keep an eye on the progress bar at the top

The progress bar gives you an idea of how things are going if you can’t see your opponent. Since they have nitrous too, a comfortable lead can disappear in the blink of an eye near the finish if you’re not careful. If you see the other marker closing in quickly, use your remaining burst (if you haven’t already) before the race slips away.

Try to recover a skipped gear (and learn from your mistake)

A rushed double-click can leave you skipping a gear, and there’s no downshift button to undo it.

If this happens, activate the nitrous immediately while the engine’s bogging down to pull the revs back up, then focus on landing the next change cleanly. It is not ideal, but it can rescue a race that looked finished.

Retry if you have a terrible start against a tough opponent

If you’ve got no chance, you can quickly open the pause menu and choose ‘Restart’ when a poor launch or two bad shifts decide the opening seconds.

Make sure you’ve got enough cash beyond the sticker price

It’s not always a good idea to spend every dollar the moment a better car becomes affordable. Its upgrades (and cosmetics) will be more expensive than the previous cars since they don’t transfer over.

Keeping a small cash reserve lets the new car (with upgrades) be useful immediately rather than being forced to keep it stock while grinding and replaying old events.

Mighty Motors FAQ