Tinertia

A nice mid-2010’s indie die-and-retry momentum-based precision platformer, except jumping is overrated when you have a rocket launcher for an arm.

Tinertia is a game that I’ve had in my Steam library for a while. I have absolutely no recollection of how I even came to know this game even existed. I’m gonna assume Steam recommended it to me back when I was playing Super Meat Boy? Judging from my achievements stats, it looks like I got this game for Christmas 2016, so it’s been about a decade. It’s wild to think about…

Personal crisis about the passage of time aside, this game is an indie little thing made in unity in the prime old year of 2015. Like the Super Meat Boy mention eludes to, it is in fact a precision platformer that fits right in its time, as it was a very popular genre back then. Tinertia’s twist however is that unlike most games in that genre, you do not have a jump button. Instead, your player character, Weldon, is a cute tiny robot with a rocket launcher in place of where its right arm would be.

That’s right, this is a rocket jumping platformer. Therefore, the game takes sort-of-twin-stick-shooter-like controls where you shoot your rockets either by flicking the right stick in a direction, or by pointing with keyboard and mouse if you’re more comfortable with that. You then shoot at the terrain and use the recoil force to jump and zoom through the levels as your main mode of transportation. The game also lets you walk on the ground and has an air-dash button (think the Celeste dash but you can’t use it on the ground), but you are expected to use mostly rockets to either build up speed and be fast or to interact with some level elements.

The game is fun enough on its own to just go through, with a main campaign of 6 worlds of 10 stages each and a 7th world with 6 harder stages for a total of 66, but it does have extra objectives to keep you engaged if you want to go for them. For a start, each stage, including boss stages, has two extra set scores to go for. One is a speed challenge, which you might expect from a game like this (again, Super Meat Boy A+ grades anyone?), but the other is a minimum rocket shots challenge, which I’ve had a lot of fun trying to optimise sometimes. There’s also a leaderboard for both of these score goals, with replays available, so you can see how people achieved the scores they did. Some strategies for the rocket scores are nuts!

There are also a couple modes outside of the main campaign. For one, while playing through a world, you might notice the stages all start from where the previous one ended. That’s not a coincidence, and that’s because once you beat a world in the campaign, you unlock it in the speedrun mode, where you essentially time yourself to play the entire world as one continuous stage. You also unlock a boss rush mode once you beat the campaign that is all the bosses back-to-back. And no, there’s no checkpoints in either of these modes, so they’re both asking you for a perfect run in their own objectives. And if that’s still not enough, the game also features procedurally generated levels if you want to keep playing new stuff.

As for the rest of the stuff about the game, the setting is simple, but does the job: you’re a robot crash-landed in the core of this planet and are trying to climb back out. Doesn’t need much than that for this sort of game honestly. The game does show its age a little with some of the flavour text (especially with the phrase “like a bauss” [sic]), but the art style I think still looks okay today. The music is nothing mindblowing but serviceable and didn’t get too grating for me. Everything works together and the aesthetic is cohesive, so it’s good enough.

The game plays alright, and does everything else fine, which made for a pretty enjoyable 20+ hours for me over the course of the years. Except maybe the final boss took me a bit too long but that might have been a me issue. Or a skill issue. Who knows.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/311930 £11.39