Recent reviews by Solar

This is probably one of my racing game GOATs and the most incredible thing about it is that few people seem to know it exists.

BallisticNG is a spiritual followup to the original WipEout series developed by Psygnosis (Later Studio Liverpool) that began with the first entry onto PS1 and ended with 2048 on PS Vita. BNG would best be described as a follow up on the original WipEout trilogy whilst having content styled after later games also available.

The game has multiple options available to help emulate the look of a classic PSX game but has a very clean and clear cut art styling inspired by The Designers Republic's art direction of the original WipEout trilogy. Ships have distinct silhouettes with various chassis types along with styling and detailing that shows off the different racing teams identities. All ships have unique stats and finding the one that works for you is a fun learning experience as you experiment with each team and how they play.

Learning the game is easy to grasp at first but very hard to master, by default the campaigns will start you off with easier opponents and slowly ramp up their difficulty as you progress along with the overall speed of the ships. As you get used to the mechanics of how to manoeuvre your ship smoothly round bends and adjusting your pitch in anticipation of elevation changes you will begin to feel the immense satisfaction of entering a flow state for your given ship and track, the 'Perfect Lap' sound-effect pinging dopamine straight to your brain and 'Contender Eliminated' giving an almost sadistic sense of satisfaction.

As far as sounds go, everything here feels at home, there is an incredible soundtrack that includes a vast number of tracks, some hit better than others, but there are absolutely no stinkers here. Each team has their own theme as well as an accompanying track named after their slogan, a couple which stood out to me were 'By Any Means' after the Wyvern slogan and 'In The Depths' (somewhat) after the Mako slogan (I'm weak to the steel pans in this one, top job). There's also a long host of tracks that don't have an association with any team, they're just there to play whilst you race, some personal standouts here were 'Shockwave' and 'In The Zone' (very appropriately used in the trailer)

Of note also is the incredible degree of mod support this game has, the content in the workshop only scratches the surface. Tracks, ships, sound repacks, soundtracks. Anything from skins for ships which can be easily made by yourself with a good image editor to full blown overhauls of the entire game are available if you can find them, this leading to one criticism here that accessing some mod content involves digging through the games discord for posts of mod releases in the modding room, making browsing quite difficult.

Almost everything about this game is bleeding with personality and soul, it's such a brilliant passion project that is still getting yet more poured into it (As of writing, update 1.4 looks set to be yet another one chock full of content). I cannot recommend this game enough. You'd be hard pressed to find any racing game nowadays with this level of quality, but I consider it an utmost blessing that it happens to be BallisticNG doing it in such a niche sub-genre.

People need to know about this game, I hope after reading this you will go and discover how much I mean that.

Many thanks for reading.

After logging in at what was previously a time solidly within the NG zone in terms of server capacity, I was surprised to find that I logged in immediately and didn't even see any capacity notifications. The game still has bugs and crashes here and there, but the performance on the part of arrowhead in the past few weeks to alleviate that most major issue has convinced me that I can now recommend the game in good faith, and have done so wherever friends have asked me about it.

There are still a slew of bugs and crashes here and there at the time of writing, but I'm near certain at this point that they will be significantly less impactful come the next few weeks.

what the ♥♥♥♥ man

I haven't played much of this game, but it is enjoyable.

I will not recommend it as this latest update censors and removes content, and there's nothing to say they won't censor/remove more in future.

Here's to decensor mods.

nice.

Good solid coop gameplay, which is hard to come by these days.

modders fixing a rising storm game by turning it into a red orchestra game

it is suffering

-Made a Lifelong robo-friend
-Trashed someones life work
-Trashed the prospects of interstellar travel for mankind
-Got an uber home

Remember your "please" and "thank you"s kids.