BallisticNG

I have several issues with the game design itself, including lack of proper difficulty options in the campaign (the difficulty spike on normal is abysmal and the only other difficulty is expert) and only 2 or 3 ships out of the entire roster actually being viable, but my main gripe with BallisticNG is that the developers drove away the lead art director (who made the only things I really like about this game) for being transgender. Not only that, but the main developer subscribes to people like Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and Donald Trump - I can't in my right mind support people who follow divisive, hateful ideologies and rhetoric. And before you think this is just "politics", it really isn't - people are being hurt and hunt down over their sexual orientation, gender identity and/or skin colour. Enough with this. It's a shame I found out about this too late past the refund requirements or I would've done that in a heartbeat because this might be my biggest gaming buyer's remorse and I've been on Steam for 15 years.

CREDENTIALS, 1999 Just so nobody tells me I don't know what I'm talking about. 1999, freshly finished with my studies, no job, no plan and no particular shame about any of it. Wipeout 2097, six to eight hours in a sitting, Piranha on Phantom. No weapons, because the Piranha doesn't get any, so every race was me and 450 km/h and the sincere hope that nobody behind me had a Quake. Perfect laps on all eight tracks. Spilskinanke with my eyes half shut. It had stopped being a contest a long time before that and turned into something more like an unpaid job I'd given myself. Then twenty-odd years disappeared. Work, family, the whole thing. So: BallisticNG, PS1 mode, lights off. THE GOOD - It doesn't just imitate 2097, it understands it. The weight, the drift, the way a ship gets shoved off a wall like a hockey player. - Retro mode is not a nostalgia filter slapped on top. It's a full séance. - Feels wrong in exactly the right ways. Nothing on screen is where it says it is, everything wobbles, and I have never been happier. The vertices wobble. The textures slide around on the walls like they're not quite attached. Everything looks slightly wrong, which is correct, because everything looked slightly wrong in 1996 and we all thought it was the future. Whoever built this rendering mode has clearly stared at a real PlayStation for an unhealthy number of hours and I salute them. But the graphics aren't the thing. The thing is that I hit the airbrake on a corner I had never seen before in my life, on a track that didn't exist when I was 23, and my hands got there before I did. Whatever part of my brain stored all that is apparently still fully intact and still taking calls. Slightly alarming. Mostly wonderful. This game is not a racer. It's a machine for retrieving a 23-year-old from storage. THE MUSIC, WHICH WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT BallisticNG's soundtrack is very good. Properly good. Drives well, sits right in the mix, never annoys. It is not the 2097 soundtrack. It was never going to be the 2097 soundtrack, and I want to be clear that this is not a criticism of BallisticNG so much as an unfair fact about the universe. That album had The Future Sound of London, The Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Photek, Fluke, The Prodigy, Leftfield, Orbital, Daft Punk and Source Direct on it, with Tim Wright doing the in-game stuff as CoLD SToRAGE, and the whole lot of it arrived in my house in a grey plastic box when I was young enough for it to permanently rewire what I think music is supposed to sound like. You don't beat that. You just don't. Nobody's beaten it in thirty years. THE BAD - I now know exactly how much of my personality was formed by a racing game, and I don't love the answer. - Eight hours in and I've had to relearn that I have a body that requires water. - My family have started referring to the PC as "the ship." 2097/10.

Genuine 5/5 Wipeout 3 clone. Does everything that could have possibly been asked of it as a PC side Wipeout 3 clone and then does even more. Goes above and beyond. Improves on the perfection of Wipeout 3 which was already like a perfect game. Might be one of the best Racing Games ever made and I mean that sincerely. It's going to be hard to top this in the futuristic racing game scene. I mean as far as AG racers go this might be the pinnacle.

can indie devs stop themselves from expressing their worldviews for like a good amount of years game's good tho, but just like what i said in CoF review - it's up to you to decide whether seperate art from the artist or not, i suggest much more judgement and research than with free projects. Just don't yell about how you funded some problematic people wanting trans people dead like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idiot.

Wanted to try a racing game to test with the Steam controller and chose this one. Forgot all about that and got lost racing for 3 hours straight. Crazy feeling getting a clean lap without hitting the sides. I've noticed in this game feeling rumble usually means something bad which is weird to think about. Anyway this game is great and worth a damn good try!

I used to love this game. Never played the original wipeout, but I loved this game. But I'm like a third of the way through the campaign and it's just too hard. It feels like I'm just pulling a lever on a slot machine every time I try to beat a track, will the AI screw me over this time? Will my AI partner in team race not completely beef it? will the person ahead of me in eliminator get mines or something useless like cannons? And then there's the fact that the game gives you a ton of options for ships to use, but only some of them are "correct", basically use Diavolt or Omicron in Eliminator, and use Nexus and the other really fast ship in literally anything else. Everything else will get you washed. The difficulty curve on this game is made for people like the creator, who are obsessives with wipeout and have been playing it for 20 years. For everyone else, this is an incredibly frustrating time. I did really use to love this game. But I can't stand the difficulty anymore.

Loved the original Wipeout XL and wanted to play it in VR, but every anti-grav racer (like this one) feels like a zero-g, zero-atmosphere, oversized clown car racer. Acceleration is too fast so there's no punishment for hitting the side. You hit the sides of every corner. Tracks are too small. No sense of speed because everything is fast and cartoonish - accelerate, wall, accelerate, wall, etc. Weapons are frequent and do nothing. The vehicle should be slow to accelerate, long swooping bends, the faster you go the faster the vehicle straightens. Hitting the side should be a big set back...

so i love zero gravity racing games. three biggest ones being F-zero, Redout, and Sonic Riders. this game is pretty fun overall and is really well made. but i cant recommend it for a couple reasons. [h3]The campaign is boring[/h3] with redout at least, there was some customization to be had with your vehicle. there were so many tracks to play and the difficulty was just enough for me to keep trying, getting faster and faster. this game doesn't have that though. most of the campaign is just 1 or 2 actual races and the rest being boring time trial challenges or survival mode. i think a better way to reinvent the campaign would be the F-zero/Sonic riders route where you would have different racers with personalities or names attached to a certain vehicle. maybe even a rival NPC that would outpace you sometimes. With the "ai adjusted difficulty" of every race (which is turned on automatically and you are not aware of it), basically every race is breeze and becomes the exact same outcome. Another side gripe is not being able to use workshop ships in campaign. this is more a personal gripe for me, but i'd think it would be more fun and break up the monotony of said campaign if we could use our workshop vehicles in it. It really says something to me when the custom singleplayer races seem to be way more fun than doing anything in the campaign. [h3]Tutorial is lacking[/h3] i had a hard time even finding where the tutorial starts. apparently the tutorial level is just a infinite race zone and you wouldn't even know where the guide is until you went to the pause menu. the guide isn't even that helpful and some of the explanations of how the controls should work do not make a whole alot of sense. i learned alot better from just playing the game regularly and crashing over and over again than i did from anything in the tutorial. i got better relatively quickly, but it still feels like a pretty big oversight in game design. [h3]No lobbies[/h3] really i think the main thing this game could do with is some kind of matchmaking or maybe public lobbies. i cant really convince my friends to drop $15 for a racing game from a niche subgenere (zerograv) when they got other stuff to play thats usually cheaper and/or has more replay value. What i think this game really needs is a 4-player pack thats like $20-$25 respectively. that would definitely convince people to get it and be able to play with their friends in online races, as couch co-op isnt really a huge thing on PC versus console and i would LOVE to play this game with my friends at some point. From a singleplayer perspective, i cannot recommend this game to people until they improve the campaign and make it more dynamic or interesting than just "challenges".