Neodori Forever is a familiar concept: you take the wheel of a tricked out import and drift through the streets of various fun locations. The twist here is that the entire experience looks ripped straight out of the PS1/N64 era of arcade racers like Ridge Racer and Outrun before it.

The game looks great and features a really slick style, but you’ll quickly start to question if this is a case of style over substance after only a few races. The problem with Neodori Forever isn’t it’s look or design, rather it’s the fact that the racing isn’t very much fun once you get past the nostalgia bait thrown at you if you grew up with games like this.

Neodori Forever lacks any depth in the racing and what it does offer to try and mix things up ends up holding it back and making it more difficult than it needs to be. The biggest issue is the main gameplay mechanic that the game tries to push, the drifting, simply doesn’t work. The physics are less realistic and more like a pinball bouncing off everything. You initiate a drift and you’ll more often than not go flying into a wall or another vehicle.

Because of this I simply ignored the drifting, the main selling point of the game mind you, in order to be competitive. In fact, just tapping the dedicated drift button will shunt your car over a lane making this the best way to play the game, only drifting when you have a huge empty road, something that doesn’t happen all that often.

To beef up the experience the developers added very arcade-like elements like powers and coin pickups. The powerup idea is fine, it’s something that’s been done for generations, but the coin system is ripped straight out of a mobile racing title. You collect coins in order to purchase new vehicles to race with. Fair enough, but since everything seems to be randomly generated, picking up coins or powerups become a real problem.

More often than not powerups spawn in really poor areas that will likely cause you to crash instead of picking them up. The boost and coins are manageable as you can choose to ignore them since they aren’t need to win a race, but you simply can’t do that with the health powerups. Hitting walls or other cars will take health away and the only way to recover it is to pick up the health pickups. But even if you race like an A.I. you’ll still lose health as it also is tied to you gas consumption.

Health powerups often spawn on the oncoming lanes of traffic. This means you’ll go to pick one up and a car will also spawn out of nowhere hitting you, this will end up doing more damage than you would have gained and causes real issues that has nothing to do with the player and how well they play. Worse is that sometimes there are long stretches with no health powerups leading to failure even when racing almost perfectly.

It seems the tracks are all randomly generated and that works for a dungeon action game but that’s a real problem for a racing game. You want to be able to learn tracks and improve your skills by mastering the game mechanics, something that you simply can’t do in Neodori Forever. The random nature of the levels make racing a chore more than fun. The only reason I stuck around was to try and unlock as many cars as possible.

The game wears pretty thin once you get beyond the first handful of stages. You don’t even race in this racing game as you are on your own just working to get to the end of a stage. Every few tracks you’ll face a rival that has no connection to you as you don’t actually race and there isn’t a story. They simply drop in during a race. This might have done a lot to mix things up but they don’t work quite right either. You don’t do anything other than avoiding crashing into them to crashing out of a race. You’ll beat your rival simply by finishing a race. I beat them all even though they were always in front on me during races.

There are also cops that will chase you is you drive under a speed camera, taking from the Need For Speed series of games. These aren’t real issues as they simply show up to try and bump you causing damage. You can easily avoid the cop chasing you who will back off pretty quickly. Neodori Forever tries to do a lot of things that really could work is the developers spent the time to develop them. Everything beyond the overall look of the game lacks any depth and even the user interface looks like a mobile game and not like a PC release.

Neodori Forever is a slick looking title that is a blast to play for a couple of races, but it’s also a game that you find out quickly is more style over substance. For $10 it isn’t a terrible deal and I’d still recommend it if not for the broken main drifting mechanic. It’s like making a gorgeous first-person shooter where all the guns shoot slightly off target. Yeah, it looks great and the screenshots will definitely sell some copies, but you’ll give up on the game after only a little while.

* A review code was provided by the publisher *

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J. Luis

J. Luis is the current Editor-In-Chief here at GAMbIT. With a background in investigative journalism his work encompasses the pop-culture spectrum here, but he also works in the political spectrum for other organizations.

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