As a kid, there were only two things I truly loved: playing with a motley assembly of action figures, and reading Ender's Game. Inversion, somewhat implausibly, manages to combine Past Me's favorite pastimes. Its topsy-turvy, gravity-switching third-person shooting hearkens back to the portion of Ender's Game most ripe for a game spin-off: the Battle Room. In Inversion's best moments, the player and enemies alike float and dodge through the air, without a care in the world until a hail of bullets interrupts their physics-defying backstroke.

The rest of Inversion, though, feels like it was slapped together with all the focus of a child weaving nonsensical yarns in a sandbox. Interesting abilities get the cold shoulder in favor of an obnoxiously intrusive plot that unfolds without the slightest shred of adherence to logic or reason. Modern-day cops take on hulking, Mad-Max-wannabe tribal men because ... hell if I know.

It seems like the kind of story that would have emerged if Child Me ran out of police-themed figures and decided to break out WWE wrestlers to even the odds. And so, instead of taking its gravity mechanics to new heights, Inversion largely opts to make pew-pew explosion sounds with its mouth - resulting in a haphazard, hackneyed Gears of War clone that feels like it's made of pathetic, flimsy plastic.