One of the big promises we’ve seen from video game developers over the years is that more powerful technology would facilitate the implementation of destructible and deformable environments. We’ve seen many games attempt to take advantage of the technology – Red Faction, Black and Battlefield: Bad Company – but each game’s destructive potential ended up being more limited than expected. Day 1 Studios and LucasArts’ Fracture is the latest game to promise free form destruction and terrain deformation, but like many games before it, it too falls short of meeting our destructive expectations.

That’s not to suggest that Fracture’s terrain deformation isn’t impressive at first, because it’s pretty cool being able to figuratively make a mountain out of a molehill. It’s just that the novelty of Fracture’s only unique feature wears off relatively quickly, and all players are left with is one of the most blatantly derivative and uninteresting shooters of recent times.


Fracture is set in a fairly typical dystopian future, where the search for methods of combating climate change has resulted in all sorts of new technological advances, specifically in the areas of cybernetics, genetics and tectonics. Many factors, both geological and philosophical have divided the United States (and much of the world) into two factions. The existing Federal Government was not equipped to deal with the turmoil that struck the country, resulting in its collapse and the rise of two new factions. The eastern half of the country is controlled by the Atlantic Alliance, the supporters and leaders in cybernetics, while the western half is controlled by the Republic of Pacifica, which supports the use of gene therapy in solving the world’s problems. As you’d expect, each faction finds the others’ methods and ideals deplorable, and wants them to curl up and die.

Tensions between the two factions reaches crisis point when it is discovered that the Pacificans are preparing for a military strike on the Alliance. With the Federal Government now restored on the Atlantic front, the new President orders a strike on a Pacifican outpost in the new dry Bay Area, which is believed to be housing the Pacifican’s latest weapon. You play as Jet Brody, the poorly named soldier who gets to partake in this clichéd mess. In true action game style, the situation ends up being much worse than expected, and thanks to your largely ineffective allies and commanders, you get charged with saving the world. Despite the halfway interesting political situation, Fracture’s story is quickly forgotten, and serves as more of a gameplay breaking nuisance than anything worthwhile.


Jet Brody is possibly the least original lead character in recent history. He seems like he was designed by LucasArts’ marketing committee, rather than Day 1 Studios’ character designers. He’s essentially the amalgamation of the heroes from top selling action games from the last 2-3 years; Mass Effect’s Sheppard, Gears of War’s Marcus Fenix and Resistance’s Nathan Hale wearing slightly different coloured armour. Normally one can be fairly accepting of unoriginal characters – after all, many shooters borrow heavily from action movies such as Aliens, Predator and Terminator – but that’s usually because the underlying gameplay is pretty good. Fracture on the other hand is just an amalgamation of elements from other successful shooters with terrain deformation thrown on the top.

Players are armed with what the game calls an Entrencher; a weapon which allows you to raise or lower certain terrain at will. This lets you create cover on the fly, climb to otherwise unreachable surfaces, dig beneath otherwise unpassable obstacles, and crush the enemy into ceilings, force fields and laser beams. Toying with terrain levels can be quite fun at first, and looks pretty impressive from a visual standpoint, but Day 1 Studios never really does enough with the system. There is a heck of a lot of potential in the system to create puzzles which require more improvisation from the player, but most puzzles boil down to raising a hill to get onto a platform, lowering the ground to pass through a tunnel or doing both to connect a beam. The game is never quite consistent in how much you can raise or lower given types of terrain – sometimes a hill can grow quite large, but other times you might only be able to raise it once. It’s the same for structures that are affected by the change in terrain or nearby explosions – the game predetermines which ones can be taken down, but there’s no indication as to which ones can and which ones can’t.


If you strip away Fracture’s terraforming, you’re left with a bog-standard third person shooter which is mostly pieced together from bits of other games on the market – there’s the Gears of War roadie run, the Halo shield regeneration and vehicle control and so on. Fracture often does that for you, forcing you through areas where the terrain deformation is rendered useless by metal and ice. Now straightforward shooting action isn’t such a bad thing – it is Fracture’s structure which makes it completely uninteresting. Jet has a few cool weapons at his disposal, such as the ST-4 land torpedo and the vortex grenades, but many of the others are either useless or too similar to each other. You also get to tear around one level in the TDV-1, a buggy-like vehicle with the ability to grind down dirt and launch ground torpedoes. It’s a pity it steers like an anvil. The levels are painfully linear, and there are only half a dozen different types of enemies. Rather than employing any reasonable sort of AI to its enemies, Fracture instead decides to make the enemies deadly accurate. When the proceedings need to get more difficult, the game just throws more and more soldiers at you, resulting in frustration from cheap deaths as opposed to legitimate challenge.

The Fracture experience runs its course in about 6 hours, with little incentive provided to venture through the story again (beyond collecting data cubes, which unlock weapons for the testing area). Most of Fracture’s multiplayer consists of the genre standard play modes; solo and team Deathmatch, King of the Hill and Capture the Flag, but it also a unique mode called Excavation. This option has teams competing to dig holes in certain locations in a map in order to raise a spike claiming the area, with points earned for that team while the spike stands. You need to shoot the other team’s spike down while protecting your own. It can be fun once the game is going, but that can be a little difficult – there aren’t many players with the game, and servers are plagued with achievement chasers.


Fracture is a game that was essentially designed around a single novelty, and yet doesn’t make the most of this one unique feature. The generic main character and gameplay design feel like they’ve been stitched together, Frankenstein-style, from characters and components of popular games on the market, making Fracture reek of design-by-committee. Poorly conceived, linear level design, pathetic and frustrating AI and a short campaign pull an unremarkable game into bad game territory. It’s just too bad we don’t have real terrain deformation technology like the stuff in Fracture; it’d save LucasArts a lot of effort when it comes to burying the thousands of unsold copies that will be left sitting on store shelves this holiday season.