Ballistick Reviews

  • KinglinkKinglink322,917
    26 Feb 2018
    2 0 0
    Ballistick. Oh Ballistick, I’m gonna have to review you aren’t I?

    It’s hard to really review Ballistick as there’s no good point to start from. The graphics are stick figure graphics from an era where developers didn’t have the tools or art to really make anything better. But that’s not really an excuse, as there have been some brilliant uses of stick figures. Nidhogg was interesting using only a similar (or weaker) art style. Ballistick doesn’t reach the same level. Ballistick uses Stick Figures because… it does. It’s not a stylistic choice, at least I hope not, as that style is at least five years out of vogue. Maybe it hopes we won’t expect much from a stick figure game, but I expect any game to be fun and entertaining that’s the bar any game should measure up to.

    Maybe the price is 2 dollars for the same reason. If you get a game for 2 dollars, you can’t really hate it for being cheap. Again, not the best reason, I expect some level of fun and expecting 2 dollars worth of fun should be easy.

    I supposed both of these are why I find it, however, find it hard to truly hate Ballistick. It doesn’t give me the white-hot rage some games have in the past. I’m not as annoyed by it as Dragon Quest Heroes II, a game I want to like but am finding it impossible to play due to hardware issues. This is simply a cheap game, it’s not a mobile game ported like Deus Ex: The Fall, it’s just not a very good game.

    Hell, it even tries some novel concepts. There are two styles of reloading in the game, and one of them, the advanced option, gives you four magazines that don’t get refilled. You have to choose your magazine as well as eject and replace the magazine. It’s somewhat flawed (you can’t stop a reload if you initiate it accidentally) but it’s a good interesting concept. Eventually, I switched to “simple” reloads which requires only the x button press, but the concept of the advanced reload is interesting. In fact, the advanced gun system is far better in a number of ways, it just isn’t enough to really hold the game together especially with how much it slows the player down.

    The game has two styles of stages, stealth and normal gameplay, and both have flaws. The stealth stages are too easy to be detected and just aren’t very interesting stealth. You can hide behind boxes which apparently gives you perfect cover even if a camera is looking right at you. But when an enemy turns around as you walk up to him, your mission restarts from the beginning. No checkpoints, no second chances, you start over. In addition, your stealth pistol doesn’t work well, you can’t one shot an enemy so what’s the point of a silenced gun if it doesn’t insta-kill?

    On the other hand, the normal gameplay is just brutally hard, you usually have to get through a lot of enemies, and the game either makes you use a fully automatic rifle set to full auto and just fire blindly hoping you hit them before they hit you, or struggle through levels. There’s health packs but very few, and the levels are a bit of a mess as you run through them.

    I played 8 levels out of the 10 available here. There were a couple good ones. But every stealth level is a new nightmare of frustration, and a few normal levels just annoyed me. You can choose which level you want to play and the game doesn’t even tell you which levels you already beat. The game doesn’t even order them logically, claiming the second level is 3 stars, the third level is 2 stars. Why the difficulty changes?

    There is an opening cinematic without voice or really sound and that’s the “Story” of the game. If this was a story based game, I might have actually thought highly of it, at least it’s trying something in a different art style, and the story had promise, even if it tried to make "stick" a swear. Alas, it’s not. Instead, each mission has a bunch of pages of information on it but you’ll eventually start skipping them. The pages of exposition just don’t deliver. For instance, when the game asks you if you want to HALO jump or grappling hook down, ideas of awesome openings or cinematic moments might dance in your heads. Don’t let them. There are two starting points on the level and it just gives you the option between them, you don’t get to see your character make a jump or anything.

    The entire game could have a few cool cinematics, the opening scene isn’t awful, but once you reach the game, you get a very bland experience that doesn’t change much between levels. One level might tell you to “kill all the enemies” and another might tell you to “get codes from a server” and a final level is “blow up all five servers.” But thematically and feeling they’re the same. The only real difference here is if you can be seen or if it’s a stealth level. That’s just not enough.

    I haven’t even discussed the interface which at best is functional. There’s just so many issues with it, almost every screen has elements overlapping other pieces of it. The pause screen looks ugly. Nothing is broken horribly (except when the game won’t allow me to holster my main gun) but nothing is very appealing to the eye either.

    I got Ballistick from the Humble Freedom Bundle this was a 30 dollar bundle for 60 games. Ballistick isn’t the reason I bought that bundle, but it also doesn’t live up to the quality of any other game in that bundle. There are some games that I hate more (Thirty flights of loving) but it’s not a game I would have put in that bundle except to pad out the number of games in the bundle.

    Overall, I don’t want to hate this game. It’s not trying to be bad. It’s available for 2 dollars, it’s a stick figure game, it’s not promising big moments. But it fails to deliver the little moments that could make it worth two dollars.

    If you liked what you read here, or just need some suggestions on what to spend your two dollars on you can find my curator page at this link. http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31803828-Kinglink-Revi...
    1.5
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