Hello, videogamers! It has been a long time since my last review, but if you tho
ught I had given up fear not! Today, I am here to tell you about a little gem of
a game: BallisticNG.
BallisticNG is an anti-gravity racer. If you don't know what that is, that is to
be expected, because the genre is a niche one. In short: anti-gravity racers ar
e racing games in which you control a hovering ship and try to cross the finish
line before your opponents do. What makes the genre special (as opposed to tradi
tional racers) is that, since you have no wheels in contact with the road, physi
cs can get interesting. In addition, pretty much as kart racers, you may pick we
apons and defensive items from the track and use them against your foes.
BallisticNG supports split screen multiplayer, and also LAN and Internet games,
but IMO what makes this game is its rich single player campaign set. There are m
any campaigns included, each composed of a number of events. Events are usually
races, but there are also time trials in which you are expected to beat a track
within a certain time. There are also survival challenges, in which your ship is
set to always accelerate, cannot be slowed down, and you are expected to last a
s long as possible before you crash your ship against an obstacle and blow up. T
he whole number of game modes is a bit too huge to cover here but suffices to sa
y you won't get bored easily because there is a lot of variety.
This brings the very dark side of this game. It is hard and punishing as fuck. I
f you want a casual game, this is not for you. This is people who has no social
life that can interfere with the task of getting good at racing, and BallicticNG
is very, very bad at helping you at it. You can tell the design team tried -mak
ing the campaign events scale up in difficulty progressively- but the effort fel
l a bit flat. For one thing, while they try to introduce different mechanics slo
wly, presenting tracks that require mastery of different aspects of the game gra
dually, they take no effort at all explaining you those mechanics, so you will c
rash your ship once and again and again until you figure it out or ragequit.
Oh, and then there is the AI. Each event sets the AI of the computer controlled
pilots to a suitable difficulty, which ranges from "who let the toddler at the h
elm" to "professional MIG pilot is after your blood". It gets better: in order t
o get the maximum score at an event, you have to turn on "expert mode", which is
a fancy way of saying you are playing against the hardest pilots the game has t
o offer.
This is where the game shines, in my opinion. Most racing games don't feel like
racing games once you get good enough, because you simply leave all your opponen
ts behind spitting dust amd spend the whole race merringly running down the trac
k. Not here. For one thing, extreme AI is about as pacific as a Black Lives Matt
er member in a protest, so of course it will blast you continuously with rockets
and machinegun fire. Then there is the fact the AI gets very competent flying s
o you will rarely feel you are in control of the race.
The end result is you might be flying a perfect race, you might be about to cros
s the finish line, and suddenly there are explosions all around you and the trac
k is on fire and the ship is on fire and everything is on fire because you just
died and are burning in hell.
As an upside, once you manage to beat an event, you reach an orgasmic state of s
atisfaction. I can guarantee you won't realize you have wasted three days and 21
7 tries because the joy of victory will override any rational thought about the
matter.
The ships you may pick are actually quite well designed. They have statistics fo
r thrust, max speed, handling, shielding and firepower. They made a good job ens
uring most ships feel distinct when you pilot them. Fast ships with bad handling
are usually prefered by expert players because they allow to achieve better tim
es - if you sell your soul for the skill needed to fly them without crashing the
m- but I think you can just pick any ships you find satisfying to fly and still
make it.
In conclusion, BallisticNG is a good game for the small number of elite players
willing to put the effort into becoming good at beating a game that puts no food
on their plates or achieves anything meaningful beyond making you feel good. It
is released for Windows, MAC and Linux on both GOG and Steam (I obviously recom
mend the GOG version, even if it does not have access to steamworkshop).
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