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One glimpse of any screenshots of Fatal Inertia will undoubtedly bring up memories of Wipeout. Frozen in time, the two do look fairly similar. Hovering futuristic race cars. Fairly diverse weapons. Speeds ranging into the hundreds of Miles Per Hour. One minute of playtime with the game should fix this little blasphemous problem.
Fatal Inertia is, in its essence, everything that could’ve gone wrong in the Wipeout series going wrong. Lousy race tracks, bad music, cheap AI, ugly, uand an absolutely horrid physics engine sinks this game to almost unplayable. The track layouts of the early levels are forgiving enough to allow the physics engine to be fun. Before very long, the ugly truth rears its head. The physics is simply too loose. One misplaced bump will send the car bouncing through the entire race track with almost little hope of recovering, let alone recovering gracefully. The developers must’ve realized this because they set aside one face button, the Y button, specifically to “correct” this flaw. One push, and the game resets you back on course with zero speed. Because, you know, it’s just too much trouble to fix the physics engine instead.
The race tracks doesn’t help matters either. First of all, almost all of the tracks are your basic doughnut shaped race track. Meaning, if the first turn you come across is a left, than all the other turns are also lefts. They only differ in terms of length and flavor, which brings up the second point. A jungle or volcano themed tracks does wonders to adding diversity if only they don’t come off feeling totally generic which it does. All thanks to a lack of any defining details that let’s it stand out. Finally, having dark portions of track or pillars in the path is ok in creating some sort of challenge to the player, but combining both is simply a recipe for “Games that gets tossed into a wood chipper”.
Just about any game can be saved by a multiplayer component right? Not to say that it doesn’t have one, but in reality, it really doesn’t. Just try to look for any player to play online with, and you’ll be sorely relieved disappointed. In fact, as of this writting, the top ranked player have played…58 games…total. After that, the next player has played about 11 games. It than trails off to a bunch of 2s and 1s.
The real saving grace of Fatal Inertia is actually the weapons. Aside from the usual rocket boost and rocket, which by the way is actually the same thing just used differently, Fatal Inertia do boast a number of fairly unique and fun weapons. The most notable of the bunch, the tow cable, enables players to literally anchor an enemy ship to the ground. Or they can anchor it to another ship so that they collide into each other. It can even be used as an impromptu speed boost by anchoring it to the ground ahead, let the tow cable, which is kinda like a bungie rope, sling you forward, and detach it at the right time. Some of the modes are actually kinda fun because it’s more about the weapons than the actual race itself.
Nevertheless, racing games really do live or die off of the racing mechanic, and no amount of tow cable shenanigans can change that. Watching your cars bounce off of canyons walls gets very tiring after the seventh time. Try again Koei. Better yet, how about Dynasty Warriors Kart Racing?
Graphics: Flat and boring, it’s amazing what a lack of intelligent art design can do to a game.
Story: It’s a racing game! Cars go Zoom! That’s it.
Gameplay: Weapons are the real star of this racing game which is sad.
Music and Sound FX: Think of the most boring techno tracks and play it over and over again.
Game Over: Can’t wait for that Dynasty Warriors Kart Racing game to come out. Anything to wash away my experience with this game.
4 of 10
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