Now, if you're anything like me, at some point in your life you've probably sat there and fantasised about driving a forklift truck, making those tight little 90 degree turns, raising up those forks and precisely placing pallets of goods onto shelving racks. And well, today my friends, those dreams may just become a virtual reality, as Forklift Operator is a forklift truck simulator where you can do all those things and more. But will this one tick off that bucket list item, or is it actually just a complete nightmare? Well drop a like and sub if you enjoy my content, and let's find out. Now no storyline with this one so we're getting right into the action, but right from the main menu we get a glimpse of our fiery beast as it sits atop a rotating turntable, giving us a good ol' look at it in all of it's palette lifting glory. So far as the game modes go though, we get two of them, those being career mode and arcade, and I'll get onto the arcade mode shortly. But career mode opens up with an optional tutorial directed by a bearded Elon Musk, giving us a brief rundown of the game's control scheme. This ladies and gentlemen though, is where the first of the games issues become immediately apparent, as rather than have you accelerate and reverse with the triggers like any normal game where you're driving a vehicle would do, instead you control everything with the left thumbstick. Holding forward on it drives you forward and turns you left and right, which doesn't work at all for short tight movements, and it's overly sensitive once you get going making driving in a straight line an absolute nightmare. But it gets even worse, as to reverse you need to first press in your right thumb stick to switch into reverse, and then you hold forwards again to actually reverse, which is a complete mindfuck and less than intuitive to say the least. Anyway, once you've swerved your way through this tutorial, or failed it as I did, you can then dive into the campaign mode, and this one is made up of 3 different locations, each with 5 missions, or so I presume as I lost my shit with the game after about an hour or so, so only managed to complete the first 3. As you'd expect though, the game has you shifting pallets from one location to another. And upon starting each mission, you're given a brief from Musk detailing the objectives and breaking down your paycheck of it, with each having a couple of bonus objectives for completing it within a certain time limit and not smashing into shit. Now, my first mission was a relatively simple one. Remove some pallets from the back of a truck and place them onto some racking within the warehouse, and right away I got to experience just how frustrating the control scheme really is, as it took me about 5 attempts just to slip my forks beneath the first pallet. To help you out with stacking these pallets, the game provides 3 different camera angles, with the first person view being ideal for lining up your forks and slipping them in the goal, the third person view helping you gauge your surroundings and not bump into shit, though again, rather questionably, the camera doesn't automatically follow behind you and must be adjusted as you go along, and finally there's a top down view which is completely useless due to the game's ceilings not being transparent. For the most part I just used the first person view though, but the third person did have its uses, particularly when driving from one location to the next. Now I played through the first 3 campaign levels with this one, so my opinions on it are based on a limited amount of gameplay, and it could be that the other areas introduce additional mechanics. But from what I played, the game is a simulator through and through, focused entirely around shifting pallets and navigating the warehouse, so no form of fun minigames with this one. And the first two stages took place in the same singular room, but the third one opened up an additional portion of the warehouse, so there's at least a little variety when it comes to level layouts. Like the controls though, the mechanics with this one are extremely finicky. While attempting to pick up pallets, you need to line up your forks exactly, as any misalignment will result in you hitting the sides of the pallets, stopping your forklift dead, and this only accentuates those control issues as your forklift has very little power so you can't just force your way in and instead must switch to reverse, and then drive forward and try again. Raising and lowering your forks is performed by holding the R or L buttons, and you're able to tilt them after lifting them with the ZL and ZR buttons to add some additional stability to loads, but the physics are pretty off in this one so pallets don't really have any weight to them, and taller loads will still shift whilst being transported. And when it comes to dropping them at the destination, indicated by a green outline, this too is incredibly picky requiring very precise placement, and it often took me 8 or 9 tries for it to actually register, meaning the time limit bonus was pretty much out of the question. One final point is that if you accidentally knock them off whilst reversing out, you're pretty much screwed and will fail the mission if the pallet topples over. So just a bit of bonus bullshit for you right there. Now for your efforts, you're rewarded with a wad of cash, which can then be spent on respray jobs for your forklift, or to unlock 2 new forklifts. Though these are relatively pricey and you'll likely have worked your way through most of the game before you can afford them. But another baffling decision by the developer was to include vehicle damage, which degrades the condition of your forklift as you bash into stuff and comes at a cost to repair it, which at nearly $500 for a 16% repair, basically ate up everything I'd earned by completing the first level. Now finally to touch on the arcade mode, I had assumed that this one was going to be like a free play mode where you would get to select a level and layout and then try and beat a high score on them, but instead we get a no holds bar smashathon where the objective is to simply knock as many pallets off the shelves as you can in an allotted time period, but it's a lot less fun than it sounds and I actually ended up getting this pallet stuck on my forks, which admittedly I used to my advantage as a battering ram. But yeah, you're rewarded a bit of cash depending on how well you did, and like the career mode, your score for this level is submitted to the online leaderboards, which surprisingly appear to be pretty dead at the moment. All in all though, real forklift operator turned out to be a little disappointing to say the least. While the visuals are pretty decent for a switch game, and I didn't experience any real performance issues, the audio is pretty bog standard, with an odd choice of soundtrack featuring some stock dance tunes, but it's the moment to moment gameplay which really lets this one down, with all of the issues that I mentioned making for a gameplay experience that is definitely more frustrating than it is enjoyable. Now if you're still looking to fulfil your dreams of being a forklift truck driver, I recommend checking out Forklift Extreme which handles a lot better so far as the control scheme goes and features some fun but challenging gameplay mechanics and a bunch of different mini games to partake in. But that though folks is about it for this review, hopefully you found it helpful, and if you did, drop a like to show your appreciation and consider subscribing to the channel for more Switch related content. For now though I just want to thank you all once again for watching and until next time, take care of yourselves and game on. you