Inertia: Escape Velocity

The marketing blurb for Red Fly Studio's Inertia would have you believe that it's a game about defying physics. But, for a title that allows you to turn off your 'personal gravity' at will, the game's interpretation of inertia itself is surprisingly robust.

As Mr Newton tells us, inertia is the tendency of any object to resist change to its velocity or direction of travel. Throw a baseball in a gravity-free vacuum and inertia will cause it to travel endlessly in a straight line at an unchanging speed.

So it is in the game, which is a physics-based platformer in every sense of the word. At any point, you can turn off your personal gravity and inertia will make you to drift at a constant speed in your current direction of travel.

This simple idea forms the basis of Inertia's mixture of puzzles and 2D platforming, and some well-judged early chapters are used to deftly introduce you to the ways that you can utilise inertia to navigate the game's space-age environments.

And those environments are remarkably inventive, almost to a fault. In the course of the campaign you'll encounter force fields, launchers, attractors, repulsors, push fields, and more, as gameplay elements are introduced, toyed with, and then dropped in favour of something new.

It means that the game doesn't feel quite as cohesive as it might, and these disparate puzzle elements are rarely brought together in the way you might hope for.

Regardless, this constant novelty has you looking forward to each new chapter, with its promise of new toys to play with and new mechanics to explore.

Too clever by half

Since Inertia's barebones story casts you as some sort of futuristic rag and bone man, you collect pieces of scrap throughout each of the game's stages, and these unlock further stages. Tantalising trails of the stuff map out an ideal path through each level - much like the coins in a Mario game. But in practice these lines prove difficult to follow.

The sophisticated nature of Inertia's physics can also make it a little fiddly to play, occasionally slowing down the platforming action.

With your precise direction of travel determined by the split-second moment at which you turn off your gravity, following anything but a completely horizontal or vertical path of scrap requires a surprising degree of precision.

This means you'll struggle to gain a sense of mastery over Inertia.

Other puzzle-platformers train you and then test you, giving you the chance to flex newly acquired muscles in increasingly complex applications of the skills you've developed.

By contrast, Inertia's puzzles are rarely taxing, but its cental platforming mechanic remains slippery even in the final levels.

Although Inertia's complex platforming can seem like something you roughly direct rather than tightly control, that isn't to say that it's not good fun. As the game goes on and the pace increases, the sheer kineticism of it all is bound to win you over.

Bouncing through levels at ludicrous speeds and stumbling into half-deserved victories is hugely enjoyable.

Occasionally, this pace grind to a halt, and the fiddly nature of Inertia will reassert itself. But ten seconds later, when you puncture a force field with the sheer force of your movement, all is forgotten. While Inertia often missteps, it never loses its momentum.