Up to twelve tanks, twenty-five weapons on five shelves with four ranks apiece — several of them three weapons folded into one tile — plus buried gold, drone crews that race for the airdrops, a day that passes overhead, a tide that ends stalemates, and twelve biodomes of destructible pixels over water. Scorched Earth by way of Worms, with the gravity and the walls under your control and a gunner that learns from every miss.
The 2015 original proved one clean fact: a shell's whole future is fixed the instant it leaves the barrel. This rebuild keeps that fact and weaponizes it. The parabola is still x = v·cosθ·t and y = v·sinθ·t − ½·g·t² — but now there are two tanks, the ground between them is made of individual pixels, and every crater is permanent.
That one change — terrain that remembers — turns a physics diagram into a game of geology. You are not really shooting at the other tank; you are shooting at the hill it is standing on. Undermine it shot by shot and gravity finishes the job: the tank slides off its perch and drowns in the water below. Direct hits work too, but erosion is the elegant win.
The computer opponent plays the same game you do, with the same information: it takes a shot, sees where it landed, and corrects. The first shell is a guess. By the third, the guesses have stopped. Beating it is a race between your aim converging and its aim converging.
The rest is the part that makes it a game rather than a demonstration. Twenty-five weapons that each fail differently, and several of them are really three weapons wearing one tile: pay a Napalm up to rank three and it stops pooling and starts erupting; pay a Big Bertha up and it goes nuclear, with a fire rim and a ring of fallout stamped into the ground. The Tesla round flies an ordinary arc and drags a branching tree of live lightning behind it that fans wider the further it gets from your barrel. Rank four is never for sale — it drops from the sky, and only for a crew that has already finished something. The hills have gold and gems buried in them, and blowing a hole in one is how you find out. Drone crews fetch the airdrops and, at rank three, race each other for a crate still under canopy. A day passes overhead: the sun rises out of the left, apexes overhead and sets on the right, and the rock is lit by whatever hour it happens to be. And if a round drags past sixteen turns the sea starts taking the map, a little more each turn, until there is nowhere left to stand. The original twelve-weapon build is preserved under About as Ballistica Classic.
The 2015 original drew one predicted arc and flew one shell along it (with two gravity bugs, both fixed in the earlier rebuild). This version keeps that exact ballistics core — the parabola is still the parabola — and builds the game the original was always gesturing at: destructible pixel terrain, turns, wind you can see, twelve weapons, six worlds, tunable gravity and walls, and an opponent that corrects.
Pull any Wikipedia article and watch fifty thousand words obey one curve.