My real life full time job is at a major hardware store big box chain.  And if you’ve been inside one of those stores, you may have seen employees driving forklifts around.  Since I’ve been blind in my left eye since birth, I don’t drive the forklifts in the store, but I am part of the safety team so I’m pretty familiar with how they work.  So when the opportunity arose for me to review a game where you drive a forklift (yeah they’ll make a game out of anything these days), I thought it might be interesting.  And of course, forklifts play a part in other video games, too, whether it be your part time job in Shenmue or as a boss in the AtomisWave arcade game DemolishFist.  Best Forklift Operator is available on Switch and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

Driving a real forklift is complicated and takes some training, and it can be here, too. Luckily you can play a tutorial at any time.  You move around with the left stick, and push it down to enter reverse mode.  The right stick changes your viewpoint, and you can click that to view your machine from different angles, too.  Use the L and R sticks to raise and lower your forks, and tilt them up and down with the L2 and R2 sticks.  You need to tilt the sticks so you don’t spill your pallet contents as you drive around.  You can also honk your horn with the B button, but I don’t know if that does anything.

There are three main modes of play.  Career lets you take on missions where you must place pallets in the correct spots without having too many accidents.  You want to try and complete the mission without taking too much damage and losing money.  Practice mode lets you replay the tutorial or drive around in locations you’ve unlocked.  The areas are all just warehouses and loading docks and all look the same.  The last mode is Arcade Mode where you can just mess around with the forklifts and pallets without worrying about damage.

The main problem I had with this game is the controls.  They’re slow and unintuitive and not very fun.  Plus the game sometimes doesn’t register when you put your forks under the pallet or when you set them down.  You also can’t move your forks toward or away from each other like you can on a real forklift.  It also would’ve been nice for them to include safety tips or have missions focused more on safety since even though most players may not ever drive a forklift, they may be around them like in a big box hardware store. You also don’t have good visibility in this game and it really could’ve used the HD rumble features on the Switch to have some tactical feedback.  As it stands, there is no rumble in the controllers at all.  Interesting concept for a game, but not very much fun.

Kid Factor:

Nothing violent or objectionable here.  Working at a hardware store and being around forklifts, I can tell you right now that little kids are fascinated with big machinery like that and would probably want to play a game like this.  But they may have trouble with the controls.  Reading skill is also a must as everything is text based.  Best Forklift Operator is rated E for Everyone.

Tags: Game Reviews