Beginners Tips and advanced Time Trials
Basic Gameplay
For Free Form flying, just avoid the green ring at the beginning and you can freely fly around the map. The time of day passes and the weather might change. You can also find hidden orange glowing spheres.
To start a race, fly through the green ring and hit the blue loop till you hit the red goal circle. The weather and time of the day will always be the same for each race. Tracks are changed with the up in down button when in front of the green start ring. New Tracks unlock by finishing under certain star times.
At the beginning, it really help to activate the pink guide line that connects the rings in order. Default button is “G” in the keyboard.
Faster Flying
There are three ways to get faster times:
- Hitting the rings perfectly
- Flying the shortest route
- Using shortcuts by going to the overheat limit
1.Hitting the rings perfectly
To stop your suite from overheating (orange glow and filling bar at the center left), you have to hit the rings.
A regular cooling hit comes with a click sound.
A perfect hit in the center comes also cools, but comes with white flash, a woosh sound and importantly a quick boost and an increased yellow multiplier.
The multiplier is the key to going faster, as they stack up, so each successive hit gives you a bigger boost. This cuts down time, but you have to learn to respond quicker at high boost multipliers.But just one non perfect ring hit, and the multiplier goes back to 1X. Top times are achieved by getting the full boost multiplier across the race (often over 20X).
2.Flying the shortest route
There seems to be no limit or slow down on hard cornering, so the optimal route often is the straightest line possible between to ring. This can sometimes mean deviating from the pink guide line. If the track is known to you, it can be helpful to disabled it again (default “G” on the keyboard).
For hard cornering, a high sensitivity on the controller might help, as does using both sticks.
The easiest for me was flying with the mouse though, as it allows precise aiming to hit the gates perfectly as well as flick movements for hard cornering to change course after each ring.
Also the red goal ring does not have to be hit in the center. Especially when arriving at it from an angle, it can be faster to aim for the the closest edge instead.
3.Using shortcuts by going to the overheat limit
This is probably only possible with the slower beginner suite (F-5000), as it has a longer overheat limit of 3.8 seconds vs only 2 seconds in the (F-6000).
You can sometimes skip gates, if the gate before and after the skipped gate or close enough together, as the flight time is short enough to not quite overheat you. This is mostly worth it, when only one gate force you to go a detour.
The surprising thing is that skipping gates does NOT reset the multiplier. It will not go as high (as you passed less rings in total), but the shorter distance can be worth it.
