Interface

I have a bad feeling about this . . .

There are plenty of options as far as controlling the game goes. You can use the keyboard, the mouse, a joystick, or a wheel. As this game is first and foremost (well, ok, only) a racing game, a wheel or joystick would be the ideal choice. We tested the game with the keyboard as well, but found the limit of three keys at one time a big hindrance.

Into the rocks

While this is mainly a keyboard hardware issue, this is a problem that many people will encounter while attempting to pilot their pods. When you're holding down your thrusters, holding down the repair key, and you need to take a turn so tight it requires two keys (one to rotate your ship, the other to turn it), you'll find yourself in crashing often due to lack of control.

Through the aquarium

Steady, steady!

As far as wheels go, we tried both the Nascar Pro (no force feedback) and Microsoft Force Feedback wheels. The force feedback in the game adds little, if any, to the realism, and heavily detracts from the playability. Even when the force feedback settings were set to only provide the wheel with center stiffness, the game was easier to control with the non-feedback Nascar Pro wheel. However, the Pro wheel suffered from a dearth of buttons, and to play the game well, you need quite a few. You can turn, rotate, thrust, brake, tilt up/down, repair your ship, and more.

Tilting correctly is important in making jumps

As important as mastering the many controls is, it doesn't appear that a lot of time was put into the control setup screen. Tilting up/down defaults to being assigned to the Y-axis - which in this case, was the foot pedals. Unfortunately, when you assign thrusting and breaking to the pedals, the game refuses to unassign tilting. Instead, both are controlled by the pedals, a MAJOR annoyance. Hopefully, this bug will be / has been fixed.