If you’ve ever played a multiplayer puzzle/platforming game with a friend and thought, “This would be so much easier if I could just throw them,” then Fling to the Finish might be for you.
This Kickstarter-funded racing title sees you and/or another player controlling a couple of bouncy balls decorated with various accouterments through an obstacle course. Pitfalls, pinball-esque bounce towers, and other hazards block you and your other ball from the finish line, and it’s a race to fight physics and coordination to the finish line.
However, there’s a twist: at least to the players, the two balls are linked by an unbreakable tether. It’s an entirely different matter if a gameplay element, such as a laser, sever the rope. With each ball controlled independently of the other but tugged by the tether, the challenge is to coordinate against the tether’s pull through a precarious obstacle course. Each player also has the ability to glue themselves to a surface, preventing the other ball from influencing their momentum and then fling the ball via the tether overhead. Hence, the name of the game.
This unique method of obstacle navigation certainly gives the game a ton of personality, which is only amplified by the choice of aesthetics and decoration. Everything feels, for like of a better term, Looney Tunes, like a Saturday morning cartoon designed to be as whacky as possible. This works well, but I found that the choices made for some of the game’s sounds can be grating, especially when you hear them repeatedly.
The playfulness of the game, I think, is what will really get you when it comes to the aesthetic of this title. Outside of the game’s obstacle courses, every menu is navigated via your balls, allowing you to freely jump around and stick to buttons to get into the game. This is an amusing idea, and I especially enjoyed playing around in the little toy machine in the Unlockables menu. I did, however, at one point find myself having to force restart the game because, for whatever reason, I couldn’t navigate the menu… maybe my ball fell off the screen when I tabbed out?
For what the game is, it’s pretty good, with room to improve. Given its Early Access status, such limitations are expected and understandable. Unfortunately, being in early access also highlights what is perhaps the game’s strongest barrier to entry, which is a dedicated player base.
Both of Fling to the Finish’s game modes are multiplayer enabled. Not only can they be played with multiple people, but in my opinion, they should.
For race mode, this is pretty self-explanatory. You can’t race alone, and this game’s particular mechanics don’t seem like they would lend themselves well to an AI player. Campaign, however, can be played alone, but I wouldn’t 100% recommend the experience.
See, in a single-player game of Fling to the Finish, you’re still controlling two balls, still connected by a tether. You control one ball using WASD, space, and shift, while the mouse controls the other (excluding other keys for skin switching, available at any time). Honestly, I found this setup quite disorienting.
Ok, I get it. Disorientation is kind of the point. You’re supposed to work against that feeling to make it to the finish line, and without it, there wouldn’t be a game. I just personally found it too confusing to think in two directions at once, aiming my hand one way to control the direction of one ball and using WASD controls to move the other. My brain just could not figure it out in a way that felt natural or comfortable, and it led to some real trouble finishing the game’s many levels.
I’m sure there are plenty of players out there who would disagree with me on this point. For many of you, this mechanic may come more naturally than it did for me. Personally, I found it to be more akin to seasickness than fun platform navigation, so I’m going to have to recommend that you try out Fling with Friends online or with a local co-op partner instead of on your own.
The problem is, being in early access, the game doesn’t exactly have a wealth of players online at the moment. I found myself sitting in the multiplayer, finding a match lobby for about twenty minutes before I called it quits, watching as the game tried to pair me with many different regions of players, only to switch me to the game’s host finally.
This is certainly not the developers’ fault. It’s an early access game, and without a huge player base established yet, this should be expected. I just want to warn prospective buyers about this issue before they go into the game, especially if the lack of players might hurt your experience and tarnish your opinion of an otherwise interesting title.
At launch, the wealth of customization available in Fling to the Finish is impressive. Using a gacha-esque, supermarket toy-style crank machine for unlocking new skins for your bouncy ball, it’s hard to say at the moment exactly how many cosmetics are available to unlock. However, I am happy to say that they can all be unlocked directly through gameplay, and you won’t be paying any microtransactions to get new skins.
That is, most of them can be unlocked through gameplay. I was surprised to see a bunch of DLCs already available for the game. Thankfully, further investigation showed that these were just Kickstarter rewards, not day one (or… day zero, being in early access) cosmetic DLC that otherwise should be in the game.
As it stands now, Fling to the Finish is a great, playful title with lots of room to improve. Sitting at a modest $20 price tag, I think this game is definitely worth following or picking up now if you’re interested in playtesting it through its last stages of development. However, players considering purchasing the game now might also want to get a copy for their friends, as the single-player experience, in my view, lacks something.