Grade: A-
Futuristic and stylish bike parkour
FutureGrind is set in a not too distant cyber-punk future, where you are a professional bike driver who flows across a track with colored bars (to amazing EDM music, of course). If your wheel color doesn’t match the bar color, then you viciously explode. When not exploding, the bike can flip and jump, and you can chain all sorts of stylish tricks together.
Each track is relatively short and is maybe 30-45 seconds max. The same tracks are repeated three times apiece with different goals each time as you go through the levels.
So many tricks!
The main feature of FutureGrind are all the tricks you can do with the different bike types.
It’s a little hard to explain, but you have a bike with a colored wheel on top and the bottom. If you touch a non-matching color of your bike wheel to the rail as you go through the level, you explode.
The basic grind mechanics:
- push grinding (grinding from the top of your your bottom wheel)
- hang grinding (grinding from the bottom of your top wheel)
- undergrinding (grinding from the top of your top wheel)
- and then just grinding (grinding from the bottom of your bottom wheel)
And then the variations on the tricks…
With this already complex starting point, the devs layer in a bunch more variables as the game goes on.
- There is a bike whose wheel changes color every time it touches a rail so you have to plan your jump path accordingly to what color the wheel will shift to.
- Transfers are paths you take without hitting the jump button and give you point boosts and allow you to meet goals.
- There are color webs. As you fly through them, your wheels change color.
- There are jump orbs that allow you to jump further, but are color specific, so you have to line up the matching wheel with them.
With all the fiddly and fast-moving components, it feels epic to beat these levels. I died hundreds of times. The cool style of the game and the smoothness of the controls make it well-worth any outlay of effort, though. To help keep you having fun, there’s an incredible EDM music mix that goes with each level.
Mashed together story
You can unlock the stories as you do the levels and meet the various track challenges. I soon learned that there was a capitalistic rich racing owner who’s taking over the moon and an underground revolutionary that has conscripted you, the bike professional, to stop them. Beating the villain and saving the earth using your driving skills seemed rather ludicrous. I never quite connected with the story.
That’s ok, though, because the main attraction of the game is not the story. Instead, it’s the stunts you’re doing on each track.
Overall, FutureGrind was quite a hidden gem in the racial justice bundle. It took me a lovely 7 hours of play to get through all the way to the end.
Want to see more? Explore all itch.io bundle for racial justice and equality game reviews.