Fatal Inertia

Get a move on

Unfortunately, however, the obvious potential of a racing game with great weapons and a solid range of tracks is let down badly by a few major issues. The first - which is more of a niggle, but worth mentioning anyway - is that several of the tracks could have done with a little more testing, because all too often you'll get lost between checkpoints and have to learn the route through a process of trial and error.

This is a consequence of the game's attempt to provide some very open tracks, across wide terrain - a nice idea, but one which desperately needed to be tempered with better indicators for where the next checkpoint can be found. It's not a total joy-killer, but it's certainly frustrating.

What is rather more of a joy-killer, though, is the buggy track reset button - which is meant to pop you back onto the track when you fly off in the wrong direction, but all too often dumps you in an entirely illogical place. After you've been reset on the track facing a boulder or a wall a few times, only to fly straight into it because you were holding down the accelerator in hopes of a quick restart, this really starts to grate.

It's doubly annoying because each of those smashes into the wall counts towards your damage gauge - a bar on the screen which, when full, signifies a game over for you. Admittedly, if you've taken that much damage, you're probably losing the race anyway, but it's still frustrating to watch your vehicle explode and have to restart because of a bug which should have been caught in testing.

That's not it for technical hitches with Fatal Inertia - because the game also suffers from framerate problems, especially when there are a lot of craft on screen at once. The framerate isn't remotely as bad as it was in the demo, we hasten to add; but it's still annoying to see it stutter in busy sections of the track, especially since it's not like Fatal Inertia is the most graphically accomplished game we've seen, well, this week. A game like this should have a perfectly smooth framerate, above all else, and Fatal Inertia's failure to accomplish this is a serious black mark in its copybook.

It's unfortunate that technical issues like this can drag down a game which genuinely has some great ideas to its name - but drag it down they do, from being an imperfect but very interesting and entertaining racer to being something a lot closer to the mediocre mark.

A huge range of customisation options for your craft (some of them purely cosmetic, which is a nice touch for those who just want to build the coolest vehicle possible) and the aforementioned possibilities for setting up custom races mean that there's plenty to see and do in Fatal Inertia, but for many players, the basic frustration of the game's technical problems means that they won't be keen to spend quite that long on it.