Fracture

If you can get a few friends to give this a chance, I think you’ll get a LOT of play out of it.

It was a bit surprising when we completed the game and found ourselves wanting more, lucky for us the multiplayer delivers just that. LucasArts really created something special with the “terrain deformation” aspects of Fracture and the way it is implemented into so much of the gameplay mechanics was inspiring.

Take Gears of War and mix it with Halo. Add half a litre of Red Faction and a dash of Populus and voilà: You’ll get Fracture. This principle is as simple as ingenious!

An enjoyable and engrossing game. It’s a little on the short side and it relies a bit too much on the strength of a single gameplay mechanism, but fortunately it’s a mechanism that is fun and that we haven’t really seen before.

Most of Fracture’s bad points are overshadowed by how much fun changing the terrain can be. Masses of action, huge explosions and a competent shooter with a fantastic gimmick.

Fracture is a fun but repetitive game that does well with its new ground manipulation technology.

It offers a unique and entertaining feature (terrain deformation), but doesn’t utilize it in enough creative ways to keep it enjoyable. It’s run-and-gun gameplay with too much run and not enough gun. It’s a title that relies too much on brute force in its opposition, when it could have tested to see if the player could come up with creative solutions when completing objectives and having adversaries cross their paths.

Aside from the terrain-altering powers, nothing about Fracture is new, it’s all been done somewhere else and done better. But does that make Fracture poor? Not really.

I think it would be a mistake for any gamer to not even give the game a trial because, for once, developers actually tried something new, and succeeded in the process.