It’s not rocket science.
Remember the beautiful little space ballet from Disney’s Wall-E, where he’s been cast off into the endless vacuum with nothing but a fire extinguisher to save himself? Where he’s pretty terrible at it to begin with, flailing all over the place and generally going nowhere (he wants to go fast) but after a little while, he gets the hang of it and it’s really a rather stunning sequence?
Now imagine that, but with rocket jumping – yes, that’s rocket jumping, as in Quake – and you’re pretty much on the money with Tinertia.
Tinertia is really rather cute, with adorable Wall-E-esque protagonist Weldon bounding around the environment with the world’s largest arm-mounted rocket launcher that thankfully has unlimited ammo, but don’t let the cuteness fool you: Tinertia is rock hard.
Tinertia is fun to pick up but really tough to master – maybe not so severe as N++ or Super Meat Boy, but it’s up there – largely because it’s rocket-jumping madness is actually in place of an actual jump button. It turns what looks like a cutesy platformer into an insane game of Plinko, but it gets worse than that: There’s no speed limits in Tinertia.
If you keep hitting the rocket jumps, you’ll keep accelerating. If you’re on the ground, you can also activate Weldon’s speed boost, and you’ll accelerate even more. You can continue accelerating until you (probably) fall off the level and die. It’s like playing Sonic the Hedgehog in a minefield and it’s an absolute riot, but it’s also very fair.
If you died in Sonic, it was always because you didn’t react fast enough or you put a foot wrong somehow – nobody ever complained that Sonic robbed them – and that’s what Candescent Games were aiming for with Tinertia.
It’s fair to say they’ve hit their target. With a massive rocket launcher. Obviously.
Tinertia is out now on Steam, and should be blasting onto PS4 later in the year.
