Fracture

If you couldn't tell already, I wasn't a big fan of Fracture.  Much like communism, the idea of Fracture sounds great on paper:  grab a pot, throw in 1 part Halo, 1 part Gears of War, add a physics engine, and then pitch in the main ingredient of being able to change the height of the ground you walk on.  A concoction like this should equal up to the greatest thing since peanut butter and jelly, but it instead falls flat on its face with mediocrity and a level of staleness that I haven't seen since the likes of GoldenEye: Rogue Agent.  Yes...I went there.

In Fracture, you'll jump into the 22nd century, where global warming has caused the entire Midwest of the United States to go below sea level and split the country in half...both literally and socially.  In order to keep the United States from becoming Atlantis, money is funneled into research that leads to terrain deformation, which is a method that raises or lowers the soil in a semi-permanent state.  West of the divide is the Republic of Pacifica, and on the east side is the Atlantic Alliance.  The leader of the Pacificans has been altering soldiers and others with genetic modifications that the government has outlawed, and guess who has to go and stop him?  Sound ridiculous enough yet?  Well, it gets even more ridiculous and convoluted as you progress, making for an uninteresting story with characters that you generally don't care about and barely know who they are half the time.  There's one or two twists, but nothing amazing that slams you back in your seat with a "WOW".

Graphically, the game looks alright.  What game doesn't nowadays, though?  The textures aren't nearly as sharp as half the games that are out today, and all the character models...hmm...how do I address this without sounding like a total jackass?  Pacificans are Covenant Elites, Atlantians are Spartans-meets-Crysis-nanosuit, and the Dreadnought was something EASILY ripped out of Halo 2 and Halo 3.  The sprint feature for Mr. Brody even does the same motion blur effect and almost exact animation as Marcus Fenix!  The game, all-in-all, is a generic rip-off around every corner of every sci-fi space marine game we've seen in the last 5 years alone.  Hell, even Jet's CO is a black guy, JUST LIKE MASTER CHIEF!  It's a bit unnerving that a game was allowed to seriously gank all of this crap and not be sued non-stop!!!  Cutscenes instead of loading screens help give the game a couple of kudos, but those are almost immediately withdrawn due to the poor quality that the cutscenes themselves possess.  They almost look like you are streaming a video online with RealPlayer...4 years ago.  Audio quality in general is weak also, as the voice acting is very uninspired and dialogue is as bland as unspiced chili.

The main gameplay component of Fracture is terrain deformation.  You'll have two different options assigned to your left bumper and right bumper on the controller:  one lowers the ground, and one raises it.  Again, it sounds great...until you get in the game with it.  You'll end up spending more time shooting at the ground than you will shooting at enemies, which provides for multiple deaths while you are in the middle of 20 enemies and a puzzle that needs to be solved.  Let's face it.  The only reason for the terrain deformation in the first place is for the puzzle elements of the game, and sure, it beats the hell out of "get key and open door".  Unfortunately, the deformation seems to be good for SOLELY this purpose, leading me to believe that the developers either didn't have enough time to come up with a more meaningful use or they just didn't care.  You can only change heights if you shoot at dirt-covered areas as well, meaning that if you are stuck in a building...then you are just playing any old shooter.

And boy...oh...boy...are...the...shooter...mechanics...SO...fun.  If you couldn't see the sarcasm in that sentence, then you'll probably believe this game IS fun as a shooter alone.  It's not.  The mechanics on display here are broken, glitchy, and rugged as all Hell.  To start, hit detection doesn't seem to be implemented very well.  I could shoot at two enemies of the same type in the same exact spot, and it would take a different number of shots to actually kill them...and that's if my shots even hit them at all.  This makes for nigh impossible headshots unless you are just a God with virtual guns.  This even goes so far as to effect explosive devices, meaning that even a damn grenade can't guarantee blowing something up.  As if that wasn't enough, the controls have a ton of slack in them...making me remember that this is a game made by the same team that did Mechassault...and then I realize why Jet Brody moves and controls like a robot.  Day 1 was apparently incapable of moving too far away from their beloved mech franchise, and it shows far too often.  Another problem I ran into many times was sensitivity issues, as I felt like I had to mash on the Y button get keep sprinting.  Jet would keep cutting in and out, despite the fact that there is no form of stamina bar saying I can't sprint on forever.  You also can't change your camera view while sprinting.  My God, the laundry list just runs on forever.

After all this negativity, I think I should point out a couple of positives about the game, the first of which is the guns.  There are guns in this game (surprising, I know)...but they are incredibly awesome guns.  While they are somewhat grounded in some form of reality that probably exists in an alternate timeline of the 22nd century, there's a bit of over-the-top joy in them that offers up both physics fun and general enjoyment of blowing things up.  The Black Widow is a giant six-round explosives gun that shoots out, you guessed it, up to six putty plastiques before letting you choose when to detonate it by pressing X.  There is also the ALM "Deep Freeze", which allows you to freeze your enemies and shatter them, or you can use it to freeze the terrain to slow down your opponents.  One of my personal favorites is the SL-4, which shoots out a torpedo that burrows underground and follows a mostly-straight line until you, again, choose to detonate it with the X button.  There are also the shooter standards like automatic rifles, sniper rifles, and shotguns to keep the pacing pretty common, but most of the time, there's just too many guns to choose from in one area.  You can only carry two at a time (just like Halo), and with the plethora that drop for you, it's tough to make a decision sometimes...but it does allow you to cater to your own play style much better than most games.  The two coolest weapons in the game have to do with vortexes.  The Lodestone is a gun that shoots out a small vortex that sucks in anything around it for a handful of seconds, allowing you to concentrate fire in one single area much easier for quick kills.  The Vortex grenade, however, is the ace-in-the-hole.  You can only carry one at a time, and when you throw it, it will also create a vortex...but it lasts longer than the Lodestone's shots, and after it's done sucking, it throws everything back out in an example of pure physics beauty.

That's another thing that the game does well to some degree:  physics.  How the game can handle a good handful of individual physics objects being interacted with onscreen while the cutscenes are in such a low bitrate is beyond me, but when you do get to play with the physics, you'll find that there is some fun...somewhere...in Fracture.  While a lot of the interactive objects and areas are just random crates laying around in the general vicinity of where you are located, there are many times where you'll find explosive barrels and crates of mines that can be shot at, creating chain reactions and hilarious results.  Unfortunately, the downside to the physics engine is that nothing really feels like it has any weight to it, so you are basically just playing with what feels like bit empty cardboard boxes and styrofoam rocks for the majority of the play time, but the unlimited number of possibilities definitely keep each playthrough fresh to some extent.

Online multiplayer was virtually non-existant when I logged on to find a match...and after playing only a handful of matches, I definitely cannot recommend this to anyone.  With all the control issues and glitches aside, as well as the hit detection problems, the pacing of the online is slow and methodical.  The biggest component of the game that is featured, which is terrain deformation if you missed that, isn't even that much of a component in the multiplayer function.  Why shoot at the ground when you need to shoot at your enemies?  Most of the maps that I saw didn't really have much of a problem with offering worthwhile areas to hunt your prey at, and most of them are wide-open areas that allow for plenty of gunplay.  Aside from that, it's all your basic modes like free-for-all, team free-for-all, king of the hill, bomb the base...etc etc etc.  There's nothing unique here, and even if there was, it would still be plagued by bad controls and mediocre shooter gameplay.

At the end of the day, you have to sit back and say "should shooting mechanics be sacrificed in order to offer a new level of detail to the game world?".  Terrain deformation is kind of cool, in the same way that Force powers are cool in The Force Unleashed.  Okay, maybe not that cool, but what I'm saying is that it's something I wouldn't mind seeing in some future games.  In the terms of Fracture, though, it lends nothing more than a gimmick.  If Day 1 would've taken even a small amount of the time that they were working on this unique mechanic and used it instead to offer better controls, interesting characters, a not-so-out-there story, better online multiplayer, and a reason for the terrain defamation other than making it a new version of "get key and open door", it would've been much cooler.  Instead, Fracture turns out to be nothing more than the next mediocre, sub-par shooter that fails a little more than those before it because it's invested too much time into a mechanic that isn't implemented well enough.

After writing and reading this, I thought I'd let you also know:  I had this rated at 2 and a half stars...but just from penning all this, I've lowered it to 2.  Just thinking about the game as a whole makes me hate it more.