Its no secret that Radiangames have been dominating the XBL indie games market for about half a year now. The final game of their monthly series, Ballistic, certainly is one of the best XBLA games I have ever played. Ballistic is a twin stick arcade shooter, similar to Geometry Wars. It is so refreshing after playing a wealth of poorly made XBL indie games to come across a game like Ballistic. Not only is Ballistic a great indie game, I liked it more than the majority of actual XBLA games costing five to fifteen dollars.
Ballistic does everything a twin stick arcade shooter should do and then some. It combines intense game play, diverse “enemies”, and a solid selection of power ups to create a one of a kind arcade experience. Ballistic offers two modes to play, waves and challenges. You will definitely be spending the majority of your time playing waves. As the name suggests, waves mode consists of an outstanding number of enemies (usually around 600 per wave) attempting to swarm you until you reach the waves kill limit. Each type of enemy, which are distinguishable by their color, has their own movement pattern and speed. Some enemies are certainly more difficult than others but it’s the mix of which enemy types you have in a wave that determine its difficulty.
BEWARE: Waves mode is super addictive. After the first couple waves I was hooked. The way the waves are paced is fantastic thanks to the game “saving” at certain waves by unlocking a starting point at that wave. At many of those checkpoint waves you can choose an additional power up. This means that the higher the checkpoint you start, the better equipped you will be to take on the harder waves.
Every single power up makes a huge difference. One increases fire rate, one increases fire power, and another increases ballistic modes speed and damage. When you start adding up four or five of these power ups your ship becomes a lot tougher to take down. Ballistic mode pretty much puts your ship on steroids; firing shots much harder and faster than they do normally. After about to 40th wave, ballistic mode becomes necessary and truly helps a lot.
Challenge mode is decent but none of the challenges are original or interesting. Every challenge has the same goal of surviving a wave for two minutes with increasing difficulty as well as getting the multipliers that drop every 15 seconds. You also only start with 2 lives and you can obtain a third by surviving one minute. Where they differ is that each challenge features a different combination of enemy types. For the most part, the challenges just feel thrown in at the last minute and are just another thing to have a leader board for. That being said, the challenges are still fun and will keep you busy for at least an hour or so.
The CO-OP was an unsuspected delight. Ballistic is a great platform to compete with friends and family for the high score. It is extremely easy for a second controller to jump in and join you. At points is gets pretty tough to tell which ship is yours and that is generally when you and your partner die.
This review, although informative, can be summed up in three words: Ballistic is awesome. Ballistic is an unbeatable value and incredibly addictive. If you own an Xbox 360 and have an XBL gold membership, which is needed for XBL indie games, Ballistic is a must download. The most amazing thing about these seven games that Radiangames has put out in five months is that Radiangames consists of only one person, Luke Schneider. Do yourself a favor and download this game for only 80 Microsoft Points (one dollar) and support indie developers who create this type of excellent game.
