Nightvision: Drive Forever

Review

You have the choice of two game modes, Story and Sandbox.  Selecting the Story, you will then have the options of choosing the Transmission (Manual or Automatic) and the Colour of your car. Your game begins with the ringing of your phone; upon answering you find out that it’s one of your family. They never call you, not even to say that everything is fine, so you know that something is up. You say you’re on your way, and that you’re not going to change your mind. 

After saying that you’ll drive safely, you head off into the night (maybe you’ll beat your previous best time this time). It’s 12.23 am and before you, a long, dark and winding road leads to your destination. Your destination is split into many stages of varying distances. Driving from one destination to another, the road is dimly lit only by the short distance of your headlights and moonlight. 

The object of the game is to complete each stage as fast as possible. You’ll drive along the road avoiding any obstacles in your way. There are not always obstacles on the roads, which you may think would make it easier to complete that stage. However, it only takes one small error to find yourself wrapped around a cactus, a road sign, or rolling down the road sideways until your car comes to a stop upside down. It can be a bit frustrating, especially when you’re near the end of your current stage and your car slides off the road slightly and you hit the bumps and that’s it, it’s game over. When this happens, you have three options: forget about that run and start over again, save that run and start over again or quit for now and start again later.

You may think, “I’ll just drive at a steady pace so that I won’t slide off the road or hit anything as I race to the finish”. However, if you drive too slowly, you’ll have an indication in the bottom right of your car's dashboard telling you to hurry up; it will also flash red and you will also hear a heartbeat sound. If this continues for too long, then your current stage will end, and you’ll have to start that stage again from the beginning.

You can find your Game Stats in the Options for the following: Story Completed, Story Best Time, Drives Completed, Crashes, Too Slows, Top Speed, Distance, Drive Time and Cacti Hit.

In the options there’s settings for Graphics (V-Sync, Antialiasing, Draw Distance, Sky, Snow, Grass, Terrain Quality and Screenshot), Resolution, Sound (Master, Engine, Music, Road, Crash, Weather Volume Sliders and Recommended), and Controls (Key Binds and Gamepad Buttons and Calibrate).

I was playing using an Xbox One wireless controller and it worked fine for the most part. I did have to lower the sensitivity of my gamepad’s joystick to be able to control the car more smoothly. Before lowering sensitivity, it acted as if the brakes would lock up and bounce the car in the direction of my steering every time I tapped the joystick to turn or straighten up. Lowering the sensitivity lowered this action and made it a little bit smoother in steering. I did find the driving a little boring and slow; my top speed so far is 124 mph, but I never had the feeling of reaching that speed. There is an Infinity Sandbox game mode which I haven’t tried so far.  In this game mode though you can set the game’s settings, road type, road width, traffic etcetera.

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com!