Fatal Inertia

My brains are going into my feet!

The other major string in this bow, if the analogy stretches quite that far, is that Fatal Inertia offers a level of customisation to its vehicles which will appeal greatly to anyone of a tinkering mindset. Each of the initial craft fits a basic racing archetype (fast but hard to handle, slow but heavily armoured, and so on), but as you progress through the race tournaments that make up the single-player game, you'll unlock a huge variety of bits and pieces to customise your vehicle.

This customisation isn't just about tweaking the stats of the craft, though - the team has been careful to include a huge range of visual changes that can be made to each vehicle, ensuring that you'll be able to create a fairly unique look to bring online and race against others. The game supports eight players online, the same number that it throws onto the track in each single player race. Actually, that's a point of minor concern; we'd rather hoped for F-Zero-style races with dozens of opponents, and the smaller number being thrown around by Fatal Inertia could lead to some races where you don't see much of the other players.

Graphically, this Unreal 3 engine-based game isn't going to be winning any awards; the art direction isn't terribly inspired, and the graphics themselves are sitting right in the middle of Average Country by the standards of other next-gen titles. However, Koei appears to have focused its efforts on framerate rather than fancy effects, which is probably the right decision for this sort of game. The build we played seemed silky smooth even in busy parts of the track; if the final build can keep up this framerate consistently, a lot of criticism of the visuals will be forgiven.

Perhaps more importantly, the game does offer plenty of variety in its tracks. Six major areas make up the game's content - each with a unique type of terrain, ranging from an icy Arctic shoreline to a rocky Grand Canyon style area riddled with huge caves. Within each area, there are eight or nine courses, and several of them are somewhat specialised - such as Havoc courses, which boast far more weapon pads than normal, or Navigator courses, which focus on racing over combat and require a deft hand on the analogue stick.

As a first game from a new studio, Fatal Inertia is looking rather promising. Although it's being launched into a genre which is full of competition from very highly regarded franchises such as F-Zero and WipEout, there's not actually been much action on the high-speed racing front in the past couple of years.

Above all, the team's intriguing decision to look to Mario Kart for its inspiration could well pay off nicely by bringing MK's unrivalled gameplay mechanics to a setting that's arguably more palatable for many Xbox owners. That all depends, of course, on Fatal Inertia's ability to live up to the promise we saw in a fairly solid preview build; a question we'll tackle in more depth closer to the launch of the game.