It's already pretty obvious that I'm in love with the sheer speed of this game, but it's not all good. The interface could do with a little work. You have to click "Save" at the end of each track when the system could quite easily do it automatically and configuring your keys can be awkward at first as it doesn't display characters like a coma if you select that key. Multiplayer is also a pretty minimalist affair without even a browser for LAN servers; you instead have to manually enter the server IP. Needless to say, once you do get it going it's great fun to race your mates and pass them at Mach 1. The lack of Netplay is certainly forgivable too, I doubt even a broadband connection could reliably cope with the insane speeds.
It can be a touch unstable. The Grin site mentions that it will crash if you try the Extreme texture setting on anything but a DirectX 8 card, though surely they could have just disabled the option if Ballistics detects anything below a GeForce 3. It also crashed a few times when I tried setting up a LAN game. Finally, an extra difficulty level or two would have been nice, mainly because Pro is nicely challenging, yet the next level up (Ballistics) is almost impossible. One mistake and you might as well restart, and you will make mistakes at such speeds, though even quickly recovering for them won't help at Ballistics level.
Enough niggles. Maybe I should fly in the face of convention and place complaints at the start of a review so you don't end up thinking the game sucked just because the bad points got the final word. Ballistics does not suck. In fact, despite its problems it's a damn fun game, if a short lived one compared to other racers. But then I don't know any other racers that let you hit 2000 MPH.
Final Word: It might be a short lived experience as racing games go, but it's pretty, addictive, and damn, damn fast. If the speed of racing games has never been enough, you need your Ballistics fix.
By Pete Closs
Editor
[Ballistics was developed by Grin and published by Xicat]
