Ballistick is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. Mind you, the platforming is somewhat at a minimum with this one, as you instead spend your time playing with tacticool guns and reloading them carefully because reloading guns is awesome and the best part about video games. No, wait, it isn't. Basically this game is Hitman from Temu, with deplorably lazy graphics, a bit of stealth gameplay, and did I mention just how bad the graphics are? Also, the game has really bad graphics.
Let's get into why this was such a huge failure, a bad idea from the start, delivered badly.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The visuals in this game are a complete joke, it's seriously just a bunch of MS-Paint sprites/images that look like they were lazily scrawled out over the space of a couple of hours. Like, with the mouse, it doesn't look like they even used a Wacom tablet or anything. It's so bad even pixel "art" would look better than this. Pure MSPaint. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
PC gamers will be insulted by the demand from the developer that a console peasant children's toy controller should be used, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for, and must never, under any circumstances dictate to gamers how their games are to be experienced.
This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Ballistick is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
