Review: Fatal Inertia (360)

We remember previewing Fatal Inertia after a demo hit the Xbox Live Marketplace. Like most people we felt the will to live slowly seep away with every second spent playing and gave it quite a scathing write-up. Now that we’ve nabbed a copy of the retail version and can spend more time with it, we're ready to forget the demo, start afresh and hope that what we played was a very early build. Although it has improved since we last played it, Fatal Inertia still cannot shake the feeling that this is a poor man's Wipeout.

When it comes to futuristic racers we always expect some great course designs, after all, it’s not like they’re bound by the laws of physics anymore. Yet, Fatal Inertia suffers from some of the blandest and poorly designed courses ever. When your craft is travelling at incredible speeds you'd think the designers would take this into consideration and make quite a lengthy track. They haven't. Instead they try to increase the time it takes to complete each race by adding more laps. Even then it only takes around 2-3 minutes to complete each one. The races are also littered with various problems. Often you'd find yourself going under a dark tunnel which pretty much ruins your vision (don’t they have headlights in the future?) apart from a light you can see at the other side. So what do the brilliant geniuses at Koei decided to do? Why, put a brick in the middle of the road which cannot be seen by a mere mortal. This of course made us fly off the track and smash into a nearby brick wall. And in a game where one mistake can put you right at the back of the pack with no hope of catching the leaders, this infuriated us to the point where we almost snapped a controller in half. Many of these painfully annoying moments grow in frequency, as you progress through the career. Of course it also doesn't help that each vehicle is made of toilet paper.

Your vehicle is about as durable as an Xbox 360 dipped in water and combined with the fact that unlike in F-Zero you'll almost grind to a halt when hitting a wall, means progress is slow. And even if you survive such collisions, chances are you'll do a 180 spin before flying off the track into the lava below. Taking too much damage will result in your exploding and mangled corpse, something which happens more often than we’d like. If it weren’t for the Y button, which puts you promptly back onto the track, then we would hate this game with every fibre of our being. But somehow we don't.

As terrible as some parts of Fatal Inertia are we still had some fun with it, which can mostly be attributed to the weaponry.   Your arsenal is surprisingly unique, though you do have the obvious inclusions like boost and missiles, several others are quite ingenious. Our favourite is the cable, as with this you fire it at an opponent and then you can either attach it to another racer or to the wall. It provides some great moments as you watch everyone pile into one other, or if you're clever you could use it to swing yourself around a tight corner. It certainly makes each event an interesting, albeit frustrating, race to the finish.

The way your craft handles is quite clever because unlike others in the genre you don’t just turn left and right, in Fatal Inertia you really need to control your hover. Each track has a several bumps in the road and you'll often clip the floor if you don’t lift yourself above the ground. Fatal Inertia also utilises a good physics model which is evident even when coming close to a wall, as you’ll end up slanting as if there really is a gravitational field surrounding you completely.  Gamestyle wasn't too sure about the boost due to the fact you need to brake before activating it, which is an odd design decision and one that does nothing to improve the experience.

The best thing Gamestyle can really say about Fatal Inertia is that it’s better than we expected. Underneath the average graphics, rubbish track design and lack of options there is a decent enough game fighting to get out. But its one that we certainly cannot recommend fully when there are so many other games fighting for your hard earned in the coming months.

Rating: 6 / 10

Words by Adam Gulliver