Hello, videogamers! It has been a long time since my last review, but if you thought 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 are 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 traditional racers) is that, since you have no wheels in contact with the road, physics can get interesting. In addition, pretty much as kart racers, you may pick weapons 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 many 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 as long as possible before you crash your ship against an obstacle and blow up. The whole number of game modes is a bit too huge to cover here but suffices to say 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. If 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 -making the campaign events scale up in difficulty progressively- but the effort fell a bit flat. For one thing, while they try to introduce different mechanics slowly, presenting tracks that require mastery of different aspects of the game gradually, they take no effort at all explaining you those mechanics, so you will crash 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 helm" to "professional MIG pilot is after your blood". It gets better: in order to 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 to 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 opponents behind spitting dust amd spend the whole race merringly running down the track. Not here. For one thing, extreme AI is about as pacific as a Black Lives Matter 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 so 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 cross the finish line, and suddenly there are explosions all around you and the track 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 satisfaction. I can guarantee you won't realize you have wasted three days and 217 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 for thrust, max speed, handling, shielding and firepower. They made a good job ensuring 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 times - if you sell your soul for the skill needed to fly them without crashing them- 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 recommend the GOG version, even if it does not have access to steamworkshop).


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