Fatal Inertia, or lack there of...

After only playing the game for a few hours I honestly couldn't stand it long enough to write a formal review. So I decided that this was probably a better forum to discuss it. First and foremost Fatal Inertia does look good. Water shines, dust gets kicked up, and lava spurts up on to the track with a really cool effect. All of these things certainly make the game easy on the eyes and not dropped out of hand. But I will explain why Fatal Inertia doesn't work very simply.
I will explain the controls, remember this is a racing game. First you need to hold down the A button as your gas, X as your brake, Right button to fire your forward weapon, Left button to fire your backward weapon, Right trigger and left trigger to corner, Right stick for steering both right and left and up and down, Left stick also allows you to turn more broadly, and down on the D-Pad to drop a weapon. Now remember, this is a racer not a flight simulator or a First Person Shooter. You are supposed to be able to fly around an obstacle filled track while doing all this.
The worst part about all this is that the tracks are non-linear but they want you to fly through check points and if you don't you aren't progressing. There would be plenty of opportunity in a game like this for shortcuts and cute tricks but this is hampered severely by the fact that you must fly through these checkpoints in order to finish the race. All modes are basically a race with combat of some type.
The variety of crafts and options available for them are wonderful in theory but in order to get these upgrades you must win races and in order to win races you need upgrades. Because the two out of three crafts you are with are too difficult to use for their own good even using the upgrades your given. The game has no difficulty settings which it would have benefited from. This game is certainly an interesting successor to the old Podracing games but in those games you weren't shooting at your opponents you were just racing them. This game would have benefited from not using all most every button on the controller and not having so many obstacles on the track. Both would have helped including a slower ramp up in difficulty.
Rent before you even consider buying. I didn't like what I played too much but perhaps with a large time investment it would have been a better game. 5/10.