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Fracture is the second of LucasArts' suggested
attempts to re-establish their reputation to that of their
Point-N’-Click heyday, following after the summer’s
 Star
Wars: The Force Unleashed. That the first title missed the
mark considerably cast a watchful eye on a game that showed nothing
but promise – for as gamers have seen time-and-time before, promise
doesn’t always result in anything more than just that.
The premise of Fracture itself is where the
attention has come from, and here it seems as though it is
warranted. The player is giving the ability to manipulate the very
ground you walk on; creating craters or small hills. The Terrain
Deformation principle itself, given a little thought, is an
incredibly empowering ideal for videogames, and throughout it’s
demonstration Fracture has been seen to offer some
interesting uses for the capability.
Terrain Deformation is the main aspect of the game,
wrapped-up in some nonsensical pseudo-political plot wherein the US
had been divided into warring factions of the east and west coasts:
east representing support for technological advancement, west for
human augmentation.
The title is divided into three Acts. Following a linear
path throughout, the player is faced with
Gears of War inspired combat, minus it’s most rewarding
feature - the Cover System – which becomes increasingly repetitive,
against increasing numbers of enemies. Indeed, the numbers increase
in later stages to the point where the
 game
obviously can’t handle any more on screen without noticeable issues,
and so some will simply remain off-screen until room is cleared for
them to enter. The puzzles the player will encounter are limited, to
say the least. The first couple of hours will invite will grins when
obstacles are overcome, yet their blatant repetition and obvious
signposting throughout the later, less inspired stages soon becomes
a more than a little tedious.
Though the idea of the Terrain Deformation itself is fantastic, it
appears that Day 1 Studios have taken the opinion that an idea, for
now at least, is enough. Limited purely to areas within which the
team have said you can play with your new toy, the complicated
physics feature is immediately stuttered by the fact that it only
has a rudimentary effect on gunplay, and predetermined, obviously
signposted points of course-plotting solutions. The effect is also
somewhat diminished when realising that most enemy weaponry – though
some will require a lot more ammunition to do so than others – can
slowly push-back any ground you may raise, and not simply chips bits
away, but actually move the ground in the exact same manner. Perhaps
the technology to cope with the ideal version of a game like
Fracture doesn’t exist yet, or perhaps, like
Assassin's Creed, it does, but developing a game worth
playing with it is more complicated than first considered.
Fracture is a game to which each easily assigned bullet-point
is a marketing team’s dream. Good graphics; check. Huge,
screen-filling enemies; check. Guns, destruction and violence;
check. Online Multi-Player; check. Indeed, even the title’s
protagonist has undergone a rather drastic make-over since developer
Day 1 Studios originally unveiled the title, with the renamed Jet
Brody now strikingly resembling Star Wars: The Force Unleashed’s
Starkiller.
Fracture is a good looking game, with far fewer flaws than
its Star Wars acquaintance. And into that universe it could
quite easily fit. Exactly why LucasArts have
 chosen
to separate Fracture from the Star Wars franchise –
other than the possibility of treading on Star Wars: The Force
Unleashed’s toes – will probably forever remain a mystery. The
soundtrack is numbingly average and the characters involved have
little in the way of personality beyond Science-Fiction stereotypes.
For all its promise, Fracture has become little more than an
average Third-Person Shooter. A technical accomplishment limited by
an ineffective use of possibilities it provides, the linear
Single-Player Campaign is simply poorly designed. Things improve in
Multi-Player, as would be expected with such an all-encompassing
feature, yet still the lack of variety in the gameplay modes and the
difficulty in finding a match renders this aspect almost redundant.
Fracture is enjoyable at times, but with the Xbox360’s
rapidly growing catalogue of groundbreaking titles, that simply
isn’t enough.
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