Do You Even Forklift? Review
Garage 5’s Do You Even Forklift? builds a charming puzzle game around reckless forklift driving, cramped spaces, and low-stakes urban chaos.
Do You Even Forklift? Credit: Garage 5 / Take IT Studio!
Parking enforcement with a forklift is a patently hilarious concept, and Do You Even Forklift? from Garage 5 and Take IT Studio commits to the bit. You spend the entire game shoving kei cars, vending machines, and whatever else is in your way around a cozy Ghibli-inspired Japanese prefecture. I had fun zipping around and causing minor property damage for a few hours. I also kept waiting for the game to do something messier and more ambitious with the idea, and it never really does.
Every puzzle is a tiny single-screen map viewed with a fixed camera. Levels revolve around putting cars where they should be or removing them from where they shouldn’t. The forklift itself feels surprisingly good to control, even though I was exceptionally bad at driving. It honestly became part of the appeal. Flying into a cramped alley too fast and watching the forklift wobble under a badly balanced car has a nice slapstick energy to it.
The game introduces new gimmicks at a steady pace across its 65 puzzles. One sequence has you dumping cars into water to build a bridge out of submerged hatchbacks. Another introduces electric cars tethered to chargers. There’s a set of levels where you must carry cars through a carwash to reveal their color. The issue is how quickly most of those ideas disappear. Levels arrive in batches of four, teach a mechanic, then move on. The game rarely layers concepts together, so even late-game solutions stay pretty straightforward. Seeing hilariously inspired bits like cars dispensing from a giant vending machine come and go so quickly was a little disappointing.
Do You Even Forklift? Credit: Garage 5 / Take IT Studio!
The simplicity of the levels kept some concepts from feeling worthwhile. There’s a bowl of ramen “hidden” in every level, but the ramen is always immediately visible and never a challenge to grab. It turns what could have been a fun collectible challenge into rote completionist busywork.
The rigidity of Do You Even Forklift? keeps it from fully cashing in on its absurd premise. There are only so many objects on each map, and the small play spaces limit the kind of chaos you can create. I kept wanting larger levels, more opportunities to break puzzles apart, and more chances to just screw around with the physics sandbox. Instead, the game stays tightly controlled almost the entire way through. I just wanted my forklift to be an agent of chaos. A real menace. I will admit, dumping cars into the river to get them out of the way never gets old.
Do You Even Forklift?
Do You Even Forklift? is charming, goofy, and consistently fun to drive around in, but it’s too restrained to ever fully embrace the chaos inherent in its premise.
