Fatal Intertia puts you in a race series where you’re piloting a hovering race vehicle which can hit speeds of 900km/h. Some tracks are wide open with easy turns and are set around tropical islands with beautiful clear blue water, others are narrow and twisty, making you drive through lava filled canyons - I wouldn’t recommend doing supersonic speeds through the latter. You and your opponents can also pick up various weapons as you race - from explosive magnets that attach to the opposition to weigh them down until they detonate, through to a rope with magnets on either end that can be attached between two hovercraft, or another hovercraft and a stationary object, or even yourself and a stationary object to help you swing around a tight corner. They’re all very novel weapons.
But the most original part of Fatal Inertia is the amount of control you have to exercise over your vehicle – they don’t just cling to a set altitude above track as if they are held in place with an invisible tractor beam, their altitude above ground will vary with sudden changes in the slope of the terrain – if there’s a sudden drop away you’re left hanging in the air until gravity catches up with your craft and pulls you back down to the ground. However, with even a modest drop your craft will gain enough momentum to clang into the ground and cause moderate damage to your craft. With a pull back (or push forward, depending on how you have your controls set up) on the control stick, you can pitch your craft’s nose up, providing additional lift and avoid any damage.
It’s all quite original, and initially plays very well. There are plenty of circuits, plenty of different hovercraft to choose from (each with their own characteristics) and as you move through the game you’ll be given special parts you can optionally customise your hovercraft with, to fine tune performance. However, the game’s originality in control is both a boon and it’s main failing. With fairly faithful physics in the game, a 900km/h hovercraft is hard enough to steer left and right, let alone pitch up and down to match the terrain. As soon as the game started ramping up the speed of the vehicles I was using and the complexity of the tracks I found my hovercraft ended up bouncing along the ground instead of flying smoothly along. I can forgive the mediocre graphics, and there is some great racing to be had in the game, but this is a game breaker.
Fatal Inertia is a good shot at a futuristic combat racing game, but it really needed a bit more work to make the vehicles handle a little more forgivingly. I’ve no doubt that a supersonic hovercraft requires superhuman skill to pilot, the problem is I don’t have superhuman skill - I play games to make me feel like I do, and the ever-increasing battle for control isn’t a challenge, it’s annoying.
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