Fatal Inertia On Xbox 360
Fatal Inertia satisfies the craving that people have to be racing futuristic hover crafts in good grahics. At least on the Xbox 360 they are great graphics, but graphics aren’t everything. After choosing from six different locations to race on and many different crafts to choose from you will hope to have a thrilling ride and of course will always want to beat the competition.
Controlling your craft is innovative enough, since in addition to the usual left and right stuff you’re forced to deal with elements of pitch and yaw as well as side boosts when manoeuvring around tricky corners. This ain’t no flight sim though, and with its arcadey onus it’s only occasionally you’ll have to pull your nose up sharpish to dodge ground obstacles. Then there are the weapons - the usual generic suspects like rockets and ‘force blasts’ are redeemed by some smart secondary abilities, such as providing you with temporary speed boosts.
Most of the weapons you can launch against your seven competitors, whether you’re competing in the tiered career mode or playing on Xbox Live, are predictable, though the ability to choose whether to fire a rocket for damage or use it for added thrust is intriguing. Magnets fired onto opposing vehicles disrupt their handling, EMPs disable everything in their blast radius, and force fields shield from harm. By far the coolest options are a time dilator that slows the temporal dimension for everyone else, and the game’s one truly inspired feature: an elastic cable that can do everything from tether two opponents together to rubber-band you into the lead, thanks to the Unreal Engine’s (mostly) convincing physics simulation.
Fatal Inertia’s major, unforgivable stumbling points are that, 95% of the time, it’s just not bloody quick enough. This is the next generation Koei, so if F-Zero GX on GameCube can pull off barnstorming 60fps super-speedy racing why are we lumbered with crappy frame-rates with all the thrills of a joyride in a ride-on mower with the handbrake on? Further inexcusable incompetence is to be found in the presence of irritating checkpoints (miss one and you’re buggered), a total lack of shortcuts and so-so course design.
There are other little problems like how a heavy metal ship can stop at the drop of a hat when it hits a thin tree branch. Problems like this could hurt their chances of being the next best thing in hover racing. I guess we are just going to have to wait for the next one.
