Fatal Inertia Hands-On
The futuristic hovercar racer is zooming toward the finish line, and we've got a hands-on look at the game.
Fatal Inertia is Koei's entry into the combat racing genre on the Xbox 360, and it's certainly like no other high-speed game available for the system. With a blend of high-speed racing, unique weapons, beautiful graphics, and some tricky course designs, the game hearkens back to older sci-fi racing games such as Wipeout while pushing the genre ahead with current-day technology. At Koei's recent press day event, we were able to try out the game for ourselves to see how it's shaping up ahead of its September release.
With the game so close to completion, we got a chance to try out a number of different events and locales to see what the game has to offer. The first thing you'll notice are the game's lush environments, which are spread out across six locales, five of which are available to you at the start of the game. The environments run the gamut from arid canyons, to fertile green tropical forests, and a particularly cool-looking ice map that has you piloting your race craft as it skims over ice flows and through frozen caves. Each of the environments has nine courses available to them. Most of the courses we raced in our hands-on time with the game were a bit too compact for our tastes--we would have liked to be able to open up with our race craft a bit more but there was no doubting the level of challenge in each course. In fact, with so many objects to avoid (such as deadly rocks or low-hanging tree branches), the game will test your racing skills right away.
You'll be tearing up these race levels in a number of specially designed flying race craft, each of which is manufactured by one of the game's four fictional corporations. Each craft has a design all its own, which you can customize to your heart's content, and all of the race craft have their individual strengths and weaknesses. Race craft from the Mercury Corporation, for example, have excellent acceleration and maneuverability, while those from Titan Industries are notorious for their heavy armor and extreme top speed.
In a race, we found that it took a while to get used to the game's controls and physics implementation. At the high speeds these race craft hit, it can be tricky maneuvering them around tight corners until you have the steering and braking controls under your fingers. Braking works far better than trying to scrub speed off in the corners by lifting off the acceleration--after all, it is called Fatal Inertia for a reason--and, in order to make the tightest turns possible, you need to work in the banking mechanism (controlled with either the left or right trigger) along with steering your craft with the analog stick.
Once you've got a handle on the feel of the race craft, you can move on to the various weapons available to you in a race. You can grab new weapons by flying over weapon pick up pads distributed throughout the various maps. Some of the more interesting weapons on hand are the time dilator, which slows down time for all of your opponents, letting you blow past them in the process; the EMP blast, which temporarily incapacitates your nearby foes (and their weapons); and the cable, which can be used in a number of ways. You can attach it to an opponent to slow them down, grab hold of a stationary object in order to slingshot your way around a corner, or give your own race craft a boost of speed using the cable's elasticity to your advantage. One interesting use of the cable we found by accident was the ability to tie up two opponents together. In addition to using items as weapons, you can use a handful of the pickups to boost your own race craft, such as attaching a rocket or a force blast to the rear of your craft for a temporary boost of speed.
As you work your way through the races in the game's career mode, you'll earn new parts that you can install to the various race craft you've collected in your garage. While some of these parts are merely cosmetic enhancements (such as new cockpit designs), many of the upgrades--such as new engines, wings, or brakes--will have a tangible effect on your race craft's handling. In addition to parts upgrades, you can apply new paint jobs and emblems to your vehicle, and unlock new designs as you make your way through the game.
Fatal Intertia has three main game modes--quick race, career, and a training mode--and there are five different race types: combat race, magnet mayhem, velocity, knockout, and time trial. A combat race is your standard winner-take-all dash to the finish. In magnet mayhem events, you'll be using one of the other primary weapons in the game, magnets, to adversely affect the handling of your opponents. For example, you can attach a magnet to your foe's wing and watch him veer off course (preferably into the sheer side of a cliff). Velocity races also feature restricted weaponry. Here you can't use magnets, but many of the boosting weapons, such as rockets and force blasts, are fair game. In knockout events, the last racer in the field is eliminated on each successive lap. Finally, time trial races pit you against the clock as you try to best your record times in any of the game's more than 50 levels.
Fatal Intertia's good sense of speed, attractive environments, and multiple race types (including online multiplayer) should make it an attractive option for those who've been looking to scratch that futuristic racing itch. It remains to be seen if the game's sometimes steep learning curve will be too much for casual race fans looking for something new on their Xbox 360. The game is due for release in early September.
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- GameSpot Score6.0fair
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