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One of the first things that should strike anyone playing Fracture is the overwhelming sense of deja vu. Fracture is littered with features that have been borrowed for every other popular shooter of the day.

The hero of the story, Jet Brody, is a stereotypical shooter hero who has been heavily inspired by Marcus Fenix and the marine from Doom. The game itself echoes the entire FPS genre in an attempt to find its way. Sadly, this doesn’t work out to well for either Fracture or anyone who plays it.

Fracture’s single-player mode is a bland-fest of re-hashed plot standards. It begins as you head into a futuristic San Francisco to locate the leader of the Pacifican rebels – a faction of heavily genetically modified humans who are angry at the Atlantic Alliance (that’s you) outlawing human genetic modification. As it turns out, the crazed General Sheridan has a massive doomsday machine that he plans to unleash on the United States and bend the country to his GM-will.

With this story Day 1 could have gone very high-brow and made the single player mode a cautionary tale of the dangers of tampering with the human genome. Instead it descends into an onslaught of increasingly frustrating enemies that offers up nothing new aside from the much-vaunted terrain deformation. This is the only original feature in Fracture and even the ability to move the earth does not save the single player campaign from being an ultimately forgettable experience.

The terrain deformation itself is accessed by two means. One is the Entrencher mounted on Jet’s arm and the the other is an array of grenades. The Entrencher gives Brody the ability to raise and lower the ground at a whim. There is a limit to when he can do this and often a layer of tarmac will remove his terramorphing abilities. The most common grenades have similar effects with the subsonic grenades and tectonic grenades being able to raise and lower the ground in a more violent fashion than the Entrencher.

There are two more grenades that Brody has access to and they are a little more interesting. The spike grenade causes a spire of rock to shoot into the sky. This can be used to prop up sagging platforms or Brody can even ride it to higher ground. The Vortex grenade is the real fun weapon. It creates a huge swirling vortex of rocks and debris that suck in anything nearby. It is pretty spectacular to watch Pacificans get hurled around in their final minutes of life. Stand too close however and you could be joining them. The real disappointment with this is that Brody can only carry one at a time and they are hidden away in nooks and crannies so only the most diligent explorer will find them all.

Fracture’s multiplayer is a different story. The designers have implemented an interesting array of weapons including the torpedo launcher which fires underground projectiles that can be detonated by the player and the extremely hilarious Rhino. The Rhino creates a large ball of rock an catapults it in a straight line. It then follows and player who it passes by a crushes them. This produces literally hours of fun.

The multiplayer has a variety of the standard modes including deathmatch and capture the flag in solo and team modes. There levels are fairly well designed and fun to play of although there aren’t a great number of them to choose from.

The overall feel of the multiplayer is similar to Unreal Tournament but this time the similarity is a welcome one. The play is fast and frantic and the terrain deformation is much more useful here than in the single player mode. The only downside, which affects both single and multiplayer modes, is that Brody can never carry enough ammo for any of the weapons. This means running out at the most irritating times and then having to switch back to the standard and extremely ineffective machinegun.
Fracture seems like a waste opportunity. The potential for terrain deformation is very limited and it does not enhance the generic storyline at all. It feels more like a gimmick rather than a serious gameplay element. Going some way to cover the cracks in the single player mode is the multiplayer. It is fast and fun and will find its own niche on Xbox Live. Unfortunately, despite trying something other than Star Wars, LucasArts’ new IP is not the earthshattering experience we had all hope for.

Written By Ewan Aiton