Wonderwallweb.com - Article: Fatal Inertia

Fatal Inertia takes us to the 22^nd Century and shows that like any other futuristic sports game, it has to be brutal and extreme. But does this disregard for human life for the purpose of entertainment make it any good?

In the 22^nd Century, large corporations own pretty much all of the world, they run the business, politics and also entertainment. To show off their power and wealth, the top 4 companies pit their own skills and technology against each other to prove who is the best. Rather than do this around a card table or tiddly-winks, they decided to go for the most extreme spectacle them all, Fatal Inertia.

Each ship is basically a high powered hover craft, the face buttons speed up and slow down, hold both brake and accelerator to build a Brake-Boost, this will give you a short burst of speed when taking some of the sharper corners. The trigger buttons will barrel roll your ship, this will effectively shake off any enemy attack, and the bumper buttons fire the primary and secondary weapon functions. Whilst the controls are tight for a racer, there are some very frustrating moments in game play where if you take a corner wrong or fly over the checkpoints, you can end up facing the wrong way, and it is very difficult to turn back, and by the time you have your 1^st place is long forgotten. There is a self righting function, the Y button will warp you ship back to before the point where you went wrong, but this feels like cheating and an easy way out of a tight spot.

After you have proven yourself in a few races you can choose from each of the 4 ships. You have the slow but well protected Mercury, the all rounder Phoenix, fast but weak Aurora and the tank like Titan. With only 4 ships to play this may come off as a shock at first, however, rather than go for the f-zero approach of lots of ships, you can upgrade and alter each of the ships to your hearts content, making them almost unrecognizable from their original specs. However to do this you will need to win races, and this is not so easy.

To say the opponents are tough is an understatement; they will nudge you and shoot you as much as you try to take them out. There are 5 different level sets and about 50 track choices to play through, you will be taken to a dusty old canyon (Star Wars Pod Racing), dense woods, paradise islands, a volcano ravaged city and ice glaciers. The main Career mode will have you play a set amount of tracks and the goal is to be at the top of the league at the end. An impressive touch is the diversity of races, you don’t just have be first to the finish line, there is also knockout where the last player on each lap is eliminated, Magnet Mayhem, where all of the weapons pads are removed and you only have magnets to shoot at each other, the magnets will slow down the player, and eventually blow up, and also the rather fast paced velocity rounds, in which all weapons pads are replaced with rockets, which you can use for an extra speed boost.

The weapons are your normal fare of rockets and smokescreens, however there are a few exceptional ones in the list. First off, most weapons have a secondary function, for example the rockets can be also used as speed boosters. There are also two rather cool new weapons, the cable, this has a few uses, you can attach one end to an enemy and the other to the floor causing them to slow down, attach two ships together and also attach it to a corner and let the cable swing you around at full speed (think the Batmobile in Batman). This weapon will take some getting used to and at first you are more likely to catapult yourself backwards. The other weapon is the Time Dilator, this will slow down time all around you, enabling you to speed past opponents.

The dystopian feel of the game is really well reflected in the graphics, from ruins, sea levels and giant volcanoes, the graphics are top notch. The ships themselves start off quite bland, but once you start building up accessories, they do start to look better.

Though initially a very eye pleasing game, I did get bored very quickly of this title, while all of the boxes have been ticked, with the high speed, rocky sound track, plenty of tracks and weapons, it seems to me to be just not enough. It does not have the madness of pace from F-Zero or the arcade feel of Wipe-out. I’m not saying this game is trying to copy them, it just that with those two titles, it had a lot to beat in my opinion.