Fracture Review

October 2, 2008 - There have been a lot of comments made at my desk this past week as passersby have stopped to watch and play Fracture, the latest from LucasArts and Day 1 Studios. A few have marveled at the ability to raise and lower terrain via devices in the game, others knocked it for looking too much like Too Human/Gears of War/Dark Sector/Halo, a few have laughed out loud as they watched the driving portions of the title, and some have said it looked kind of fun.

The weird thing is that they are all correct.

When you pick up your controller, you'll be set in the super-suit of Jet Brody, a member of the Atlantic Alliance's armed forces. See, in Fracture, the year is 2161 and everything's gone to hell. Climate change led to the Midwest flooding, and the east and west just got more and more distant with a sea in between them. The east -- the Atlantic Alliance -- began leaning on technology to better their world, while the west -- the Republic of Pacifica -- began tinkering with genetic modification as a way to mold their futures. When the game opens with Jet flying to the Pacifican home base in San Francisco, the president has just outlawed drastic genetic modification. Seems after the announcement of the federal ban, the leader of the Pacifican resistance General Nathan Sheridan began gearing up to take down the Alliance. It's up to Jet to infiltrate Sheridan's base, figure out what's going on, and take out the threat.

Jet's far from alone in his journey though. Aside from an ever-present comlink to his adoptive father and military mentor, Jet's packing a whole bunch of nifty toys in this third-person shooter. A super-suit similar to the ones found in Halo and Gears of War provides him with a shield (as evident by a blue bar on screen that drains when Jet takes damage and refills when he's not getting shot) while he'll get to pick up and play with a dozen different weapons, such as your standard shotguns and sniper rifles, as well as the ALM-37 Deep Freeze that turns enemies into popsicles and the Rhino that hurls electrically charged boulders at baddies. You can only carry two of these weapons at a time, but you're free to drop one of them for whatever you find while traipsing around the environments that are sure to become lopsided thanks to the terrain-altering weapons in the game.

On top of your guns, you'll have four grenades attached to the D-Pad. A vortex grenade basically creates a mini-black hole that sucks everything to one spot, spins it around, and blows it up; but the other three all shape the battlefield. One explosive will let out a blast and raise the dirt into a hill, another will create a deep crater, and a third will create a spike that towers into the sky. Fracture's whole hook is that you can screw with the levels like this, and the biggest part of that plan is a suit function known as the Entrencher. Now, although Fracture categorizes the Entrencher as a weapon, it really isn't. The Entrencher is the tool that allows you to raise and lower dirt on a whim. If you come to a pedestal you can't reach or a wall you can't scale, chances are you need to unleash a blast to get to the objective. The device takes no ammo and only needs to recharge if it's fired in succession a few times.

I'm sure LucasArts and Day 1 Studios are hoping that these devices and the terrain-altering abilities will be enough to separate Fracture from the bevy of other run-and-gun, third-person shooters on the market, but they won't be -- sure, Fracture can be fun thanks to its weapons, data cells to collect, and gun battles, but overall, the game is pretty generic.

Fracture's terrain mechanic is occasionally used really well. When I'm surrounded by Pacifican forces -- usually green dudes who pack machine guns or rifles -- and the screen's black and white because I've taken so much damage, the ability to create hills for instant cover makes the Entrencher worthwhile. However, that's not the case for most of the game. See, the Entrencher can only be used to lower or raise dirt. You can't shoot concrete, marble, etc. This means that if you're running through a building and suddenly come to a dead end, that one patch of dirt in the back corner probably has something to do with your escape plan. Yeah, I used the gun to create cover during a few firefights, but most of the time I was using it to clear a pipe so that I could get from Point A to Point B, run a device into an overhead shield so it would blow up, or something similar. These limited reasons to use the tools just keep on repeating like this.

Sadly, the repetitive nature of the Entrencher can be applied to everything in Fracture. The levels, story, boss fights, and more all involve doing the same things over and over and over again. The story's broken up into three acts -- San Francisco, the southwest, and Washington D.C. -- but there are no chapter tags or subtitles for the act parts. That means you're just killing everything on the way to your radar-marked objective, and when you get there, you repeat the process after a quick save that often causes the screen to stutter. It's like you're just running through one excruciatingly long level.