Title edited as it has been pointed out to me that the sale has actually ended
I picked up Descenders and Absolute Drift. Only tried the latter so far, but it’s great fun. Feels like there’s an extremely high skill ceiling to it that I am unlikely to reach. It only cost me £1 too!
I normally go for sim racers like Assetto Corsa and Automobilista, but I have a real soft spot for the old Wipeout games and the similarly-aged N-Gen. Pacer (a touch light on tracks but a perfect spiritual successor to Wipeout) and Jetborne Racing (basically a tech demo and extremely demanding with a gamepad, but worth checking out) have been fun releases in somewhat more recent years
Since you mentioned AG racers, check out BallisticNG and the Redout games.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for BallisticNG! Sadly it wasn’t significantly discounted in the sale, so it’s one to pick up either when it is on sale or when I have gotten through the rest of my unplayed games. I was initially put off a little by just how hard it seemed to be aping early Wipeout, but someone on here persuaded me to take a look
What’s Redout actually like to play? I have seen a little bit of gameplay and it looks like it’s aiming above all to feel as blindingly fast as possible
I recently started playing BallisticNG, having never played the Wipeout games. I’m finding it hypnotic and the controls feel great. I’m still on baby speeds by the game’s standards.
Out of curiosity, I looked up videos of the PS1 Wipeout games for reference and they looked slow in comparison!
It definitely was slow compared to BNG. The later games picked up the pace a bit, but never to that extent. The focus was more on trying to race cleanly with very slidey and floaty physics. In the original particularly, touching the walls at all would immediately bring you to a complete halt
Redout is a weird one. It got a lot of comparisons to F-Zero because of the speed but it plays a lot more like Wipeout, or like an F-Zero/Wipeout hybrid. It’s very fast, and the steering mechanics are interesting as it requires using both joysticks to steer through a lot of turns. I like it, but find it pretty difficult. The ships tend to be a bit floaty and the main thing is controlling well to not hit walls as they utterly kill your momentum.
With BallisticNG, it does ape on Wipeout a lot (by design) but it’s an absolute love letter to the series and is extremely polished. It also has workshop support for all kinds of custom tracks and ships.
There are things BallisticNG does though that are really interesting, like solo races where your goal is to go as far as possible without exploding from damage. You can’t use the brakes and it gets faster every few sections. Those are probably my favorite races.
Watching a couple of videos just now, I do think that Redout has managed to develop a far stronger visual and musical language than most of its competitors outside of Wipeout (and Pacer, to a lesser degree). The long high-precision aerial segments look difficult, but in the kind of way that would be really satisfying to get right
That’s actually something Wipeout did, it’s one of the few things from Fusion that people liked enough for it to be brought back. But it’s a lot of fun, so seeing it in in BallisticNG is a selling point for me
Ah, I didn’t know that, I’ve never played the series past 3 and XL.
Just a heads up to, BNG has a 2097 mode as well, with entirely different physics/control. It’s still in dev builds but it seems like the goal is to integrate both styles from OG Wipeout (2085 and 2097) within the game as separate campaigns.
You didn’t miss out on much with Fusion. I enjoyed the post-Fusion games on the PSP a lot though
Thanks for all the information on BNG!