Ricochet – Beginners Guide

This is a guide for Ricochet, with everything from the history of the game to movement tricks.

Ricochet

Ricochet is a futuristic action game released on November 1st, 2000 by Valve. Unique in both gameplay and visual style, it’s one of Valve’s few completely original game concepts that doesn’t originate in another video game or mod. The game is ran on the Goldsrc engine, the same engine used to built games like Half-Life and Counter-Strike.

Not much is known about the development process of Ricochet, but it’s generally well accepted that it was made to show the versatility and ease-of-use of the Goldsrc engine to the modding community. The game was released as a free mod on November 1, 2000, and later was included in update 1.1.1.0 of Half-Life. As of now, it is sold as a separate entity entirely on Steam. Ricochet has never seen dedicated content updates aside from general Goldsrc engine updates.

Ricochet has been a source of amusement for followers of Valve games due to its historically low player count and simple gameplay. It has a reputation of being a “bad” game with little to offer. Despite this, many praise its novelty and unique concept, garnering itself something of a cult following over the years.

Gameplay

The game is not particularly complex on the surface; you spawn in an arena of platforms with yellow arrows hanging off the side, each of which shoot you in the direction they’re pointing.

Shoot discs at other players to either hit them off the platforms and fall into the void using left-click discs, or decapitate them by with right-click ones. The latter are more limited, and you can only shoot one when your disc meter (the three disc icons at the bottom of the screen during gameplay) is full. Shooting left-click discs is much faster and allows you to overwhelm enemies.

You score 1 point regardless of how you take out another player. There are two modes in Ricochet: Deathmatch and Arena. In Deathmatch, your goal is to have the most amount of points by the end of the match.

If you’re playing Arena mode, you really win by having the most Wins. Certain maps are on Arena mode, but most aren’t; in it, you face one other player to a first-to-three matchup.

If the server has more than two players, the game makes more arenas to allow more pairs to fight. The winner of each matchup gets a Win, and then both you and your opponent play another 1v1 against other players, or against each other if you’re the only two in the lobby. Once the match concludes, the player with the most Wins is considered the victor.

Depending on the amount of players in the server, Ricochet can be anywhere from a slow, laid-back duel to a chaotic mess that lacks any sort of strategic play. Game speed also largely depends on the map, where some are much bigger than others.

Discs

There are two primary types of discs:

• Push Discs
• Decapitator Discs

Discs cannot be thrown up or down, therefore they only really travel in two dimensions. You also cannot kill yourself with your own disc; you will simply “grab” the disc and it will be added back to your disc meter.