"Frisbee with a cutting edge."

Ricochet is quite a unique mod for Half-Life, under-appreciated for its quirkiness and I can guarantee it sits on the games list of many Steam users lists untouched. Now let's be honest, Ricochet isn't the best Half-Life mod out there, but the fact that it's a Half-Life mod that doesn't involve running around with the gun foresight taking up a quarter of the screen makes it credible enough.

Ricochet, while not steering away from first person action altogether, is quite an original game in the midst of the many generic first-person games out there and consists of throwing disks at other online players jumping from platform to platform. Despite the fact multiple layers of platforms exist, disks can only be thrown on the horizontal axis, and you don't jump with the spacebar but instead jump by hitting a flashing arrow on the end of the platform.

So while that's the fundamental layout of the game, there's also various disk throws available. The standard disk throw nudges your opponent, hopefully off the platform, power shots (using all 3 of your disks at once) slice off their heads Henry VIII style whilst special shots can be picked up throughout the level. They either freeze your opponent, allow you to throw 3 disks at once or take speedy fast shots, not the widest variety of special moves but better than nothing.

So why is this game called Ricochet? That's because you get extra bonus points if you can slice enemies whilst deflecting them off special ricocheting bars, but to execute this takes a lot of skill, aiming at an enemy is bad enough, never mind judging the angle to throw a disk at many active players. Should you manage to pull this off, it can be satisfying, but it only gives you one extra point if you ricochet the disk once, 2 more if it deflects twice, and so on.

Speaking of scoring, one of the most odd factors about ricochet is the scoring system, in the sense that you earn frags for the amount of times you kill, but you aren't told how many deaths you have. It's an arbitrary feature removal, and honestly takes away a large part of the competitiveness, and only leaves you to race against others to keep on top of the leaderboard. In fairness, if you're a n00b then you'll see it as a blessing that you don't see how many times you're getting whooped, and you begin to notice how fast kill's grow, but it takes away the defensive play of the game that you'd see on other HL mods.

Ricochet's environments feel highly cheesy space-age, with bright, psychedelically coloured platforms and a very black skybox, simple environments that mask the weaknesses of the Half-Life engine as nothing has got much texture detail to it. The models themselves do the job mine, just nothing snazzy, it's an old graphics engine. The sound is very limited, with simple disk throwing effects, but hearing the effect of a decapitating slice does put a smug on your face.

It's hard not to appreciate the quirkiness of Ricochet, a game the FPS maestros Valve have took a spin-off with and is very original. Despite its simplicity and the old rule of thumb that simple concepts are addictive, Ricochet isn't like that. It feels rather constrained, the haphazardous fact that you can't throw on the Z-axis, the few places that you can ricochet and only limited places that you can platform jump. It's an idea with potential, but this execution lacks depth and it doesn't look like Valve are going to be working on a Ricochet: Source anytime soon.

Ricochet isn't a bad game, it's fun and has that novelty quirk to it. However, there's probably a good reason you don't play it, there's only three servers anyway and all maps have the same style whilst it gets boring after a while. There's little depth here, what you see is what you get, but you ought to pay homage to it anyway and give it a bash in the early morning hours of a LAN or when boredom strikes on the internet. It's a nice concept anyway and it's playable, but its not really worth the $10 off Steam, you'll get more kicks off Counter-Strike and real frisbee is more fun, plus the exercise is beneficial anyway. 6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/08/07