"Twitch Gaming". A wonderful concept, where the player is forced to make snap decisions and react with split second timing to an event. You could say that this is a feature of almost every game out there on the market, especially for the First Person Shooter genre. Sure, racing games could be classed the same way, due to the numerous hairpin turns there are on every track out there. Then, there’s Ballistics.

Ballistics is a suitably perfect game for the mindless twitchers out there in the big wide world. As the latest recruit to this futuristic sport, you must drive your magnetic bike down tunnels as fast as you can, without exploding, crashing, or indeed, having an epileptic fit. The bike is attached to the pipe by a magnetic field, and just hovers. You are in it, with the controls being a simple "Rotate Left", "Rotate Right", "Go", "Cool" (a.k.a. Brake), and the all important "Attach/Detach the Wall". This severe lack of controls leads towards an arcade feel, more of a console than a PC game. A no-brainer futuristic racing game.

Then you have the tracks themselves. The tubes are, as you can expect, just pipes, therefore it is almost impossible to get lost on the track. There is the so called scientific part of the game where you have to keep to the furthest out part of the pipe as you turn, to keep up the speed and use some centrifugal forces in your quest for insane speeds. You do have to slow down a bit, as the various obstacles that are walls and dividers fly past too quickly to realise. There are also some pickups on the track, including "Coolers" which cool your engine without slowing you down, and the dreaded "Red Bump" which slows you down. The walls and dividers are the most painful, as there is the possibility of crashing and exploding with impact, although most of the time your engine heats up a fair bit and you lose most, if not all, of your speed. True twitcher territory.

The speeds you raise as you speed along at are fantastic to look at, with Ballistics showing more of a sense of speed than most other racers. It stretches out in front of you further the faster you go. A damn neat graphical trick. The rest of the graphics aren’t really that easy to tell about, as once you’ve seen the inside of one pipe, you have seen them all. Much like the current FPS release frenzy we are in. Twitchery twitch!

Yet another sign of the finger-moving-ability of Ballistics is the fact that it takes advantage of advanced GeForce 3 features. Fun, if you are into high quality pipes and blink-and-you-will-still-miss-it objects on the track. Wonderful.

Actual gameplay in the game can be written in less than 8 words: "Hold Accelerate Down to Reach High Score". That’s all you CAN do in the game. If you beat the AI (easily) then you can upgrade your craft to something with a bit more grunt (Well, not grunt…), and you can beat the AI quicker than before! Championship modes and single player fun is roughly about it, as the multiplayer LAN modes can only really be used at a LANparty, and even then you need to find twitch gamers who are willing to play this racer, as they will be the only people at the party with machines powerful enough to run it without crashing or severe slowdown!

In summary, this is a twitch gamer game that only twitch gamers can twitch to as their twitching twitch gaming rigs are twitching fast enough for twitching to Ballistics.