Neodori Forever Review

This is it—true adrenaline. You bang your head to the beat as you run yet another red light while blasting a techno remix of L’Amour Toujours at everyone you drive past. You can barely see your challenger anymore—there is no way you can lose this race. As you hear the sirens approaching, you flash a wide grin into the rear-view mirror and press the big blue NITRO button on your dashboard. Oh, you guys want to dance?

Let’s dance.

A Streetcar Named Neodori

Developed by Crescent Moon Games, Neodori Forever is described as a stylish pixel art retro racer. Take to the streets and speed through procedurally generated racetracks while dodging cars and evading the cops. Cross the finish line in one piece and become the best retro street racer around. That all sounds great, but is the journey worth it?

High Speed Pixels

The developers claim Neodori Forever’s style to be pixel art, and while it has plenty of pixels to go around, it’s nevertheless a 3D game with a pixel filter. The color choices make the stages look quite appealing, especially when it comes to open scenery like the mountainside stages.

The part where it gets truly retro is the soundtrack. Neodori Forever borrows from a few different musical eras, including disco, techno and electronic. Using the in-game radio, you can always pick your favorite blood-pumping tracks to go with your high-speed street chase. The sounds of you repeatedly crashing into walls and other cars usually don’t drown out the music, so you can enjoy it even as you’re about to blow up. Speaking of which…

Problem, Officer?

Neodori Forever is not a free-movement racer. Instead, your car is constantly speeding forward, and you only control your movements to the left and right, as well as drifting and turbo. You use these controls to take turns, avoid cars and pick up various items on your way to the finish line.

The main obstacle in every race is undoubtedly the health bar. There’s only so much collision your car can endure before it gives up and explodes, so you have to make sure not to crash into other cars or the walls as you maneuver the streets. This becomes harder when you accidentally run through the yellow triangle symbolizing the police. Police cars have one single directive: drive through you from behind, then slow down while in front of you to ram your car once more. You can dodge them both ways, but it might be risky considering all the other cars on the road, so this tactic of theirs can cost you quite a bit of health.

Neodori Forever can be divided into two control schemes: driving and drifting. Driving is self-explanatory: you’re on a straight piece of road, and you can move left and right to dodge cars and grab pickups. Drifting is a bit more complicated. It can be activated either by double-tapping left or right, or automatically at road curves if the setting for it is turned on. While drifting, it’s quite a bit harder to dodge other cars, especially cops, since you’re moving sideways much slower (or rather, everything is moving sideways with you).

Gas Prices Who? Repair Cost What?

There are three types of pickups you can gather during a race. Red fuel icons restore health, blue lightning icons restore turbo and yellow coins give you currency. Make sure what you’re trying to run into is actually a pickup and not a red, blue or yellow car in front of you—it’s not always obvious with all the pixels.

One common reason I kept losing my health was due to the large size of these pickups. They are big enough to hide cars behind them, so always be ready to swerve out of the way in case of such an “ambush.”

From my experience, there are no microtransactions in the game. Instead, ads pop up every couple attempts. You can also choose to watch ads for a few extra coins between runs. Coins can be spent to unlock random new cars, although these seem to be purely aesthetic and don’t come with any gameplay changes.

There is an alternate version of the game on the app store called Neodori Forever Premium, which costs three dollars. This version of the game removes all ads in exchange for the upfront cost.

When it comes to mobile racing games, a lot of things can go wrong. The experience has to feel right both aesthetically and in terms of gameplay. Neodori Forever nails the high-octane, blood-pumping racing action but falls a little short with its slippery, often unreliable controls. Still, the short attempts and quick retries lend themselves to the “just one more try” type of addictive gameplay that can keep the player occupied for quite a while.