First Impressions
Danger Forever

By Chris Picone, 18 December 2022

Looking at screenshots, it's easy to confuse Danger Forever for a flying combat game. It isn't: It's a scrolling shooter. This is an important distinction because it plays like any other scrolling shooter except that it also includes a Y axis you can move on - it's a cool concept but if you go in expecting to fly around with your mouse, you're in for a rough time.

Danger Forever is a good looking game with some great post-apocalyptic mountain scenery, a sweet mecha-dragon and cool robots to fight against. Because it is a scrolling shooter, movement has to be carefully managed. Firevector did well with this vertically - the ground is a natural barrier, and the sky is filled with damaging storm clouds if you go too high up. To the sides though, there's nothing, which creates an uncomfortable experience the first time you play because you'll naturally try to fly wide to either provide a better trajectory to pick up energy cells or to try to flank the enemy and you'll just run into an invisible barrier. Likewise, you can't fly backwards so that's fine, but to the front you'll eventually hit the end where you'll have an awkward battle against the boss where you both fly up and down and side to side, shooting at each other with no forward movement. It's bizarre and a little disappointing, and could have been solved by just having the boss fly backwards (the level could loop for scenery). The combat mechanics themselves are quite good though; your mecha-dragon auto-aims as you swoop around and you have to manage heat along with energy collection and avoiding damage. What lets Danger Forever down is poor level design where the energy cells are pressed against walls meaning you're frequently flying where you don't want to go and frequent collisions halt the momentum of the game, creating a very clunky experience. Balancing is also a serious issue where a potentialy impressive upgrade system is let down by bogusly slow progression.

So, my first impression? Watch this space. The core concept and gameplay is there and the graphics are fantastic but there are just too many balancing and design issues - hopefully the developers turn this into the game it deserves to be.

Links:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/773750/Danger_Forever/