Forever Drive should feel fairly familiar to fans of futuristic racing games. The speedy app borrows its visual style liberally from both the Wipeout and F-Zero series of games. Add in the constant push to beat a quickly dwindling time limit that feels like a callback to the arcade classic Cruise ’n USA, and Forever Drive is a racing game with a nice stylistic pedigree.
Luckily, it plays pretty well, too. While players can opt to accelerate manually, the game’s default controls, where the player only worries about steering, actually fare pretty well. Without needing to worry about when to take your foot off the gas, the entire experience becomes a race against a clock that seems to be in a hurry to expire.
To combat that clock, players can add power-ups on the road that put bonus time on the clock. Meanwhile there are also stars littered on the raceway that add bonus points to the player’s score. Picking up these stars as well as passing other cars without hitting them are the main ways you’ll get a high score in Forever Drive, and a high score is essential if you ever want to unlock any of the game’s treasures.
There are numerous custom license plates and cars to be had, but they all require gobs of points. While that earning might happen quickly if players are able to play the 10x experience gameplay mode that’s available for exactly three plays at the start of the game, they’ll probably be stuck earning the slow and hard way with the regular game mode. Of course, there’s always the option to purchase additional turns at the 10x mode. I guess everybody has to make a buck.
And honestly, there’s part of me that thinks it’d be worth it to pay in Forever Drive’s case. The driving is really fun, and the game has a sense of speed that, although it never feels overwhelmingly fast, is packed with enough oomph that you don’t feel cheated out of a speed thrill. That sense of control and speed, combined with the constant race against the clock, helps make Forever Drive an absolute blast for any fan of arcade racing games.
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