| Fatal Inertia |
| Posted on 8th November 2007 by Darren Tomlinson |
Having not played a decent air race game since Wipeout 2097 I was quite looking forward to this game, so with nosebleed tissues at the ready I loaded up the disk. Once you get past the woman with the prominent nipples, who I’m sure is wearing one of those paint outfits and seems to need a streamlined helmet inside a race craft(!?), you get to the front menu screen. Standard options are in place, Quick race, Career mode, and Training. So like any self-respecting gamer I jumped straight into quick race. As you would expect you spend the first laps bumping violently around from one side of the track to the other as you attempt some sort of racing line to get to that all-important 1st place. Keeping a racing line can be quite tricky from the off as the tracks aren’t laid out on some futuristic street circuit, instead using mother nature to supply the route. This presents its own problems in that mother nature won’t give you a Monaco style crash barrier to race round, instead you’ll get the odd boulder, tree and suchlike all seemingly perfectly placed to end that flying lap you were producing. And I mean end. You can hit a ‘thing’ head on and stop dead losing any places you would’ve gained, the Y button is your get out of jail manoeuvre but by then you’ve lost a lot of ground.
Enough of the bouncing off scenery method of completing a lap, time to hit the training section, which is split into three distinct parts, Flight, Combat, and Event. Flight training is as you would expect, pretty self explanatory, but by the end of it you WILL know how to actually have a decent lap without hitting the walls on every corner! There is also a slight vertical flight adjustment with the craft too, requiring occasionally you to pull up over objects or lava pits. Or push down if you’re getting too airborne. You’ll also get to know why they leave you on the start line too!
Combat training goes through the weapons, with some nice touches being added here as some of the weapons have a primary and secondary fire mode. E.g. Rockets, with the right bumper they fly off in front of you attempting to hit an opponent whereas if you use the left bumper the rocket attaches to your own craft for a short Turbo boost. Unfortunately whilst going through the training you’ll unlock most of the weapon specific achievements which I found very annoying. Why give you the cable weapon achievements at a point when you’re being given more cables than normal and taught how to use them? There are a couple of notables amongst the armoury; the first of which being 'the EMP' which has an awful graphical effect which just looks like the values for the colour palette have crashed, then at the opposite end of the scale 'the Cable', which is a much more versatile weapon with a few different uses. For instance It can be quite amusing when you lasso two opponents together and watch them slam into the wall. Event training gives you an insight into the different races available such as velocity (only speed up weapons available) and combat where it’s anything goes with all the weapons.
So now that we’re all trained up and ready to hit the airwaves, it’s time for career mode. Basically a mixed bag of the racing types that takes you through 3 different skill levels. Each skill level has an increasing number of sub events that are further divided into race events. The first two of level 1 are made up from the weapon races and ‘Gold’ is fairly easy to achieve over the four races. The third part is the velocity races, and here the interest in the game for me started to wain dramatically. Velocity races are a lot harder, even on novice and you hit the difficulty ramp with a loud thud. It comes back to the mother nature tracks; they permanently scupper your attempts to get somewhere fast, mixed with the dark levels it becomes very frustrating to actually get anywhere. I think they tried to add items around the circuit to help with the blocking of other racers and cause them as much hassle as possible, but unfortunately they often get in your way too.
As the tracks become windier and contain more objects to hamper your progress it becomes far too easy to lose that all-important first. There are simply just too many things to collide into and lose your lead, and once lost it tends to stay lost. Unfortunately I'm not blessed with Midi-chlorians and do not have the lightening reflexes of young Anakin. The combat races also fall into the trap of making it too easy to lose the hard fought for place. I’ve gone from 1st to 8th with a couple of follow up weapon attacks far too many times now to want to try again. Most decent racers will require time and effort to actually achieve anything, but they have to keep you interested to want to progress further too. Overall it quickly becomes an annoying racer that has so many ways it could have been but just isn’t.
As commented on earlier, most of the interesting achievements will be earned during training, the rest are the usual, complete this level at gold, that season at gold, etc. Strangely they haven’t come up with a different picture for each one which against other games makes your achievement table a little bland..
Graphically the game is pretty sound and all moves along smoothly as you hurtle around the tracks. Some tracks can get a bit dark when racing in the later evening times (obviously) but there isn’t any lighting provided and it can be a bit ‘Use the force’ in some areas. The only noticeable problems I encountered where when you got close to the edge of some tunnels, it did that weird outside the tunnel camera thing, leaving the screen a little confused as to what was what. Occasionally other craft completely obscure your view too. The menu screens however leave a lot to be desired, very bland and forgettable.
Sound wise the game really lets itself down, being very mediocre, nothing much particularly stands out. I’m never really a fan of in-game music and tend to have most down or off, but I reckon with certainty most will follow suit with this one as the music is very 90’s arcade and quickly becomes annoying. Without music though, you’re left with just the in-game sounds that are severely lacking. The constant seemingly single pitch of your non-throttle engine, and the occasional slap of a weapon being sent/received, is all that you get for the most part.
The game does contain an online option, but whilst reviewing the game I tried several times to have an online race without success, almost being told instantly no games found. I tried hosting for nearly half an hour and didn’t get a single other racer. This obviously makes it impossible to comment on the online side of things. |
Single Player Score: 5/10
Multiplayer Score: 0/10
Overall Score: 5/10 |
|
|
