Fracture
is a third-person shooter, that's practically first-person, which places you as Jet Brody in a war between the genetically-enhanced Pacificans
and the cybernetically powerful Atlantic Alliance. Eventually, you can choose to play on either side, but you'll start with the
Pacificans as your enemy.
And that's the basis of the game since your missions are informed to you via the HUD and the directions from the Colonel
which always tell you where to go anyway so that keeps it fairly linear.
Fracture: Xbox 360 Clip 1: Blowing up the AA guns
Instead of shooting at all your opponents, this game's USP is that you can use the Entrencher to reshape the terrain by moving it
up and down to suit, to help you access new areas of the game or simply to screw with the baddies, making them fly into the air
when they're least expecting it! However, while such a thing is fun to play with at first, you can only use it so much in
each area, so don't think you can go redesigning an entire world.
It's rather like the promise of 2001's
Red Faction
that stated you could blast holes in walls all over the place - when in reality, you can only take things as far as the game
design will let you, so you lose the sense of free play that it apparently promised.
Fracture: Xbox 360 Clip 2: Pacifican trapped in the wall!
Random observations about this include that you'll die loads of times in this, although your health regenerates when you
take cover, so as long as you're not being shot at for a minute then you can take a breather and you'll be fine.
As well as various weapons, you'll get to play with a spike Grenade which extracts a column from lava buried in the earth,
and a tectonic grenade will raise the terrain whilst eliminating the enemy.
Fracture: Xbox 360 Clip 3: Destroying the shield, dropship & the hydras
The footage of this game makes it look out-of-this-world and it certainly does pack a punch, but it's very repetitive and the
only thing that makes this differ from the usual third-person-shooter - well, nearly enough first-person since that's almost
how you view it in the tightness of battle - is the terrain rising/lowering, and that's a novelty that wears off after a while.
The sound is very loud crash/bang/wallop, which holds no surprises but does what it says on the tin.
Overall, it's fun for a few hours, but it's not a keeper. It's very much got that 'seen it all before' feeling - aside from the
terrain alteration, and having been done better in the past. Try it for a rental if you're not sure.
In this review, I've uploaded a number of clips which are as follows:
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
