A decent TPS with a unique gimmick of shifting the terrain in the battlefield. You can use this ability to make cover for yourself and solve environmental puzzles. The gunplay ever so slightly riffs off Gears of War although unlike that game you are going to be moving and jumping a lot. As a matter of fact, this game takes a bit from Halo too with the shield regeneration and vehicle sections. It was hard for me to not notice frankly.

Enemies have serious aim so you can't just bum rush encounters or you'll die a quick death. There are some boss fights but nothing too special. I feel like I've said this before, but I seriously miss this era of shooters. They didn't have to be narrative masterpieces, just good ol gunning action, it just so happens that Fracture provides a more unique take on it.

This was actually a really fun game, well at least the first few hours were. Even 12 years later it holds up as being a pretty interesting, fun, little 3rd person shooter. It has the one notable gimmick of being able to control the terrain on a whim. Your terraforming powers allow you to raise or lower the ground as you see fit. However the game gets pretty one note pretty fast. There's not a lot to do other than blast your way through enemies and then raising the ground to clear an obstacle, or lowering it to get under one. There was hardly any creativity ever put forth in utilizing your terraform powers. The game needed more puzzles to complete with your powers. Also the mechanics of it didn't work terribly great. I would often find myself lowering the ground I was standing on when I meant to lower the hill in front of me I had just raised. Things like that became frustrating. The camera was far too zoomed in and made it hard to see the things you were trying to clear and how relative your man made hill or spire was to the fence you were attempting to clear. I feel this is the perfect example of a game that would have tremendously benefited from a sequel. I feel like a sequel would have fleshed out and polished all these little shortcomings of this game.

The worst part of this game was the constant onslaught of enemies. It became so annoying towards the end. The second you would enter a new part of a level the game wouldn't allow you to soak in the atmosphere and begin to think about the next challenge before it filled your radar with enemies. On the easiest difficulty the enemies would go down easier with melees than with the weapons which made them feel even more like annoying little gnats and rendered the shooting pointless. Some of the guns were quite original and fun like the one that shoots an underground rocket and detonates on command. Others were incredibly satisfying to use like the black widow which is a grenade launcher that explodes on command.

Overall this was still a fun game that was better than a lot of stuff coming out at the time. The buttons were laid our correctly and you could sprint and it was much more colorful than the brown/green/yellow haze that tainted seemingly every game at the time. The music was really good which is no surprise from a lucasfilm company project. One reviewer that I read stated that the main character of "Jet Brody" is the single most derivative character in all of gaming. Couldn't agree more and can't believe that name made it to the final product. A sequel could have taken the pages out of Halo 2 and allowed you to play a separate campaign storyline as one of the "bad guys." I felt playing as both factions could have been a lot of fun. O well. Here's to sequels we will never get.

The hoopla about Fracture was the terrain deformation technology that Lucas Arts created to hopefully push next-gen games in another direction. The technology works and really changes the way games are played, but it’s wrapped around a derivative, almost boring, third-person shooter with a luke-warm plot, lame enemies, and cheap deaths. The story goes a little something like this: The world has finally gone too far with global warming and the USA uses terrain deformation to split the US of A into two parts so the northern polar waters can flow through without taking the country under. Knowing our testosterone induced government, both sides create their own little “nations” the Alliance (east) and the Pelicans…I mean Pacificans (west). A crazy lunatic, Sheridan, who thinks his ideas are better than everyone else’ tries to use human modifications to take over the world. So agent Jet Brody (isn’t that a girls name?) is sent in to do the one-man-army thing. While the story is really interesting it’s never delivered properly and isn’t utilized enough.


The game does have some pretty cool weapons…along with annoying ones. They have weird abbreviated letter-number names, but you have a cool grenade launcher called the Black Widow that lets you detonate the grenades on your command. You have rocket launchers, a sniper rifle that only has two rounds per clip (what?!), a couple of different machine guns you get the idea.

Now you’re probably wondering what this terrain deform-whatchamacallit is right? Well you have a tool called the entrencher and you can raise and lower dirt WOW?!?2!#$#! DIRT!!! Ok really…it’s very helpful and you use it to solve puzzles, get up ledges etc. Another part of your terrain deform-whodawhat is your grenades. Some lower the ground, some raise it, and the coolest is the spike grenades. They raise a spike right out of the ground!!! You can use this to get to higher places, make bridges by pushing broken parts of it up, or kill enemies! I also have to mention that the game does have that shield recharging thing like in Halo (damn you Halo!! You’ve cursed us for life!!!), but your shield and melee power grows over time. You also have a cool stomping technique to crush enemies and comes in handy at CQC.


Now that all of that is out of the way the game is really cheap. They throw too many enemies at you and you can’t really find cover since you have to make your own with your entrencher, but terrain can be lowered by shooting at it so everything kind of negates itself. You can freeze terrain with a certain weapon (who knows what it’s called right!) and enemies then BLOW hit them and they EXPLODE! The game also has like a sucky engine where you can use a Lodestone (why that name?!) to suck enemies into one spot and pull debris on top of them. I also love the portal grenade that has this huge swirling sucky…power…that has a HUGE radius and kills everything! Now the enemies are pretty smart. They dodge grenades, get to cover, and will run away from you and melee you when you come too close. I have no complaints about the AI it’s really good.


The visuals, however, are pretty damn good with lots of particle effects, high res textures, and great lighting. The game looks awesome, but everything still looks just plain. The enemies are always yellow (kind of reminded me of Haze and TimeShift for some reason), there aren’t many different enemies, and everything is just too close to the real world. You fight in San Francisco then you move to snowy DC. It’s very typical and nothing very awe inspiring. When it comes to multiplayer I can’t tell you much because I didn’t bother trying it since the single player bored me of this game. You can beat the game in about 6-8 hours and it’s pretty darn short. This is a great rental, but for the love of god take your $60 and buy Dead Space, Silent Hill: Homecoming, or go pre-order Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2…just don’t waste $60 on this game!