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Racing games are a huge subset of the gaming market by themselves, but oddly enough there is the further subset of “futuristic” racing games has plenty of titles as well. While it is a narrow view of racing as a whole, this niche genre has been popular for decades. Building upon its predecessors, Cybernetic Walrus (great name) is trying to teach an old genre some new tricks with Antigraviator.
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While many futuristic racing games tend to focus on nothing but speed and frenetic movements and twitch reflexes, Antigraviator has become a melding of both the causal and the hardcore. While keep the maniac speeds and high tech looks, it also uses the ability to set traps for other racers like you might see from Nintendo. It seems like an odd mix at first, but it also really changes the game more than you might suspect. Instead of pure reflexes, there’s also strategy and planning more than you would ever see from its predecessors. In fact, instead of just choosing from a list of ships like you might expect, you can also choose to customize each part of your chosen ship, like the wings, engines, etc. This is nice for racing of course, but speaks to a deeper level of customization that you would normally expect, and only helps to further any plans you have for your play style.
Graphically, Antigraviator is definitely nice to experience, but I wouldn’t put it on the same level as some of its contemporaries like Redout. Everything is a bit too sharp and boxy at times, and it could use some better blurring to make you feel the speed you are going. It does have a nice feature of putting different tracks to a theme, instead of all at once. For example you have 5 different worlds or themes, and then multiple tracks within those worlds. With these different worlds, it’s a nice mix of different environments that don’t feel too similar, so the replay value is high. It was also a nice touch to put the amount of boosts and what your place is during the race as a graphic on the back of the racer itself, since you’re guaranteed to see that part of the vehicle.
I am quite pleased to see this game fill a market that needed some innovation. It has the hardcore racing nerds go insanely fast and set record times, but also with its local, online, shared split screen, along with traps to trigger allows for some nice casual level gaming with friends. I also appreciate that with no sales going on, it is cheaper than most of its rivals in the same area, so it has all the right ingredients to be popular.