Fracture Review

Painful.

Version tested: Xbox 360

Cliff Bleszinski observed recently that Active Reload is one of the best ideas in the whole of Gears of War, and the fact that nobody's ripped it off is bizarre - especially when you consider how much they have ripped off. Gears may not have invented clip-to-the-wall cover systems, but it certainly popularised them, and even if you discount that, you can't throw a stone without hitting an action game that owes Bleszinski a pint. Fracture certainly does, having nicked the Roadie Run with an almost actionable disregard for variation, and - if that's any indication - the gently concealed data chips you collect and the player-character's crimson barrel-chested armour are also casual lifts.

Fracture doesn't have a cover system though, and that's because its big thing is terrain deformation, and deformed terrain is too curvy and freeform to snap your back to, even if the game's enormous volume of crates, boulders and barrels would be a perfect alternative. Instead you dig instant pits and compose muddy mounds to certain (hard-coded) depths and heights using the 'Entrencher', and the game plays out around this deformation as a standard third-person shooter. The implications are interesting: protect yourself from turrets by erecting makeshift cover, solve puzzles by pushing, steering and burrowing past things with the terrain, and tackle enemies by juggling them into the air and letting rip with your basic arsenal.

Sadly the developers won't leave you to it. Even after a heavy-handed tutorial level, every puzzle solution is the blindingly obvious last step at the end of a narrowing gamespace, or simply highlighted by icons or described by your CO, who barks instructions through an earpiece throughout. Anything that isn't spoilt by design falls down almost immediately because the solution is simple and repetition and clunky mechanics ruin the satisfaction of implementing it, the wrong bit of ground regularly leaping or sagging in response to what seemed like a well-aimed Entrencher blast.

'Fracture' Screenshot 1

It's entertaining to watch the vortex grenade whip up your enemies. Sadly it's about the only thing that's entertaining in Fracture.

As for combat, your arsenal is surprisingly puny, utilitarian and understocked for long stretches, while enemies are numerous and accurate, so instead of making tactical judgements about how to utilise deformation you either madly spam the floor to carve out a window for your Halo-style overbody shield to recover, or forget about it entirely, only remembering when the Entrencher is upgraded with new functions. Basic mechanics are mishandled, with creaky analogue acceleration meaning it's harder to target your foes than it should be, while the range of enemies is predictable and they rarely react to being shot until they absorb the final bullet, emphasising the grind and removing any sense of pace from firefights, which are either slow, ranged affairs or fierce and frantic up until the last moment.

Graphically the game is repetitious and bland, and everyone walking past my desk inquired whether it was an Unreal Engine 3 game - not a criticism of Epic's ubiquitous technology base, but an obvious sign that there's little at any given point that we haven't seen before. The most unusual thing about the visual design is that all your enemies appear to have been clad in gold foil, conjuring images of C-3PO Arbiters, while pretty much all the environments are gunmetal greys, muddy browns and mossy greens spread across deformable basins, through caves and over prefabbed military and industrial facilities that could be from Halo, Resistance or any other recent shooter you care to mention. The quality of Michael Giacchino and colleagues' expressive, rousing score is in sharp contrast to what's being thrown through the frame buffer.

There are a few good moments, but there's nothing particularly innovative. The vortex grenade, which swirls and gathers everything in its vicinity, including rocks, crates, enemies and pickups, eventually levelling out and distributing its victims face-down across a wide area, has been done before (as long ago as Quake mod Painkeep's Gravity Well, to pluck the oldest one from our collective memory), and an epic encounter with a skyscraper-sized walking dreadnought is sullied by the memory of much better equivalents in games like Halo 3.

Meanwhile, the game's Americocentric post-climate change story about conflicting biological philosophies is drowned out by a functional script, bland characters and conveyor belt scenarios (one of which centres around an actual conveyor belt), and there's nothing to like about the chap whose shoulder you spend the game looking over (especially his name - Jet Brody, for goodness sake). Set-piece moments pepper the arc, like the destruction of a familiar San Franciscan landmark a third of the way through, but these are immediately drowned out by the descent into another clichéd game of assault the genre staple facility, and while checkpointing is usually fair, irritating enemy design (hopping, jetpack-equipped rocket-launcher types, for instance, or burrowing mini Corpsers) and the game's other faults compensate by elevating the frustration levels.

'Fracture' Screenshot 2

The hard-coded depths and heights of deformable terrain call to mind Volition's original Red Faction, and illustrate the problem with the concept.

Away from the campaign, Fracture supports 12 players across a range of familiar modes, the one exception coming in Excavation, which is a team-based game of capturing and holding territory by erecting and then protecting a spike. With a middling array of weapons, second-best mechanics and the same issues as in single-player conspiring to distract you from terrain deformation abilities, however, there's nothing here that will encourage you to come back as often as better shooters like Gears of War, Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, and nothing structurally interesting to note, save perhaps the perfunctoriness of the 360 Achievements, which reward 50 games completed in various game-types and 10, 100, 250, 500 and 1500 multiplayer games endured. We pity the people who care about this stuff enough to bother.

We get through a lot of third-person shooters in a year, and our tolerance inevitably drops, so it's worth acknowledging that many of the vast list of things we object to in Fracture equal the low standard set by the likes of Turok and Haze, and that if you managed to survive those games without burning down the shop that sold them to you, this will suffice for a weekend's distraction. But with the vastly superior Gears of War 2 just weeks away from release, and even Dark Sector delivering an order of magnitude more innovation and class, there's little reason to celebrate a game that fumbles the basics of this generation's most prominent copy-and-paste genre and almost singularly flops with everything else it attempts.

4 / 10

Read the Eurogamer.net scoring policy

Comments (42) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • konstantinos #1 3 years ago

    ouch...! that's a bit harsh, ainnit...? maybe a break, a sabbatical to clear your head and re-evaluate...? it can't be that bad...!

    cheers...
    Edited by 1 at 10/10/08 @ 07:18
  • bad09 #2 3 years ago

    Never thought this would be any good TBH.

    / dreams of the good old LA and their great games.

    Oh, and LA FFS 360 is screaming for a Battlefront game, where the f**k is BF3??????!!!!!!!
  • oxymoron #3 3 years ago

    4/10? christ on a cracker!
  • lambtron #4 3 years ago

    This always looked terrible. In all the videos you just see a guy running around lobbing terrain deforming grenades all the time to kill people. Which is really clunky. And slow. Why not, you know, just shoot people?
  • siro #5 3 years ago

    The review seems to be on the point (unlike eg.de). This a 4, Force Unleashed a 5 or maybe a 6 - that would have been pin point scoring.
  • Pirotic #6 3 years ago

    The score doesn't surprise me at all.
  • NegativeZero #7 3 years ago

    @Rodney: while I agree with the sentiment, I really don't want Lucasarts to raid X-Wing / TIE Fighter again. They'd only screw it up.

    Seriously, if Fracture and Force Unleashed are their best examples of what their internal development teams are capable of, then maybe canning internal development wasn't such a bad move. No offense to the teams themselves - I suspect that Lucasart's problems are at a higher level - but I get the feeling that a better developer would have canned Fracture at the prototype stage when they failed to find a decent game in the concept, and they would have delayed Force Unleashed for 6-9 months to iterate on it and playtest it more thoroughly.

    EDIT: WTF, replying to a comment posted in the future?
    Edited by 1 at 10/10/08 @ 08:19
  • Der_tolle_Emil #8 3 years ago

    /deletes unplayed demo
  • 3william56 #9 3 years ago

    I had my money on "Give me a break" for the review tagline. Oh well.

    LOLture. FracLOL. Erm... dammit even the name is cr*p.

    So... a dead cert this is going to feature in the next 360vsPS3 faceoff - and I sincerely hope the 360 version is better.

    So to summarise: Nice concept for a single weapon in a good game (like the Gravity Gun), but not something to base an entire game around. Who'da thunkit? Ohwell - more time for LBP.

  • menage #10 3 years ago

    Yeah. 4/10 is a bit harsh. It was certainly a lot better than Turok and like said the demo didn't seem all that bad. Nice and colorful, if a bit far fetched.
  • Royal Fool #11 3 years ago

    The single fact that you recommend Dark Sector instead of this is enough of an insult. I truly feel sorry for the people who worked on this game.
  • andywilkie35 #12 3 years ago

    I thought the Fracture demo was appalling
  • Max_Powers #13 3 years ago

    The demo was awful. One of the blandest pieces of shit I ever had the misfortune of playing.
  • Charlie_Miso #14 3 years ago

    LOL - another shit wii game
  • Redeye #15 3 years ago

    Better than Super Bombad Racing, then?

    /also dreams of the old LA, and the wonders of Rescue on Fractalus, Koronis Rift and The Eidolon...
  • Rodney #16 3 years ago

    I know this is going to come up sooner or later so I may as well say it now, where is our current-gen x-wing game or XBLA x-wing vs Tie-Fighter!

    LA has such a strong back catlogue of strong IP's I just wish they knew what to do with them.

    I really miss the LA star wars games from the 90's. it may just be nostalga on my part, but the art style of the original trilogy star wars universe was just so much better.

    more Rogue Squadron, X-Wing, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight please
  • GamesConnoisseur #17 3 years ago

    I thought the demo was fine but did wondered how much gameplay you can stretch the deformations to, but 4/10 yipee and even havethe not so good placing at the metacritic that sealed its fate for me.

    Not even worth the £1.99 price point for the visual 'interactive' demoscence 'Linger in the Shadow'?!
  • AbyssUK #18 3 years ago

    @Rodney

    Amen brother, bring back Tie Fighter!!

    @disc and muslceblade

    how the hell have you posted 1hr in the future! Do you own deloreans ?
    Edited by 1 at 10/10/08 @ 09:56
  • InsoFox #19 3 years ago

    Oh, Lucasarts. Remember the good old days?
  • muscleblade #20 3 years ago

    I like The force unleashed, but i hated the demo of Fracture so i think 7/10 and 4/10 seems spot on imo.
  • paketep #21 3 years ago

    And yet another POS comes out from Lucasarts. How the mighty have fallen.
  • Darren #22 3 years ago

    Well I thought the demo was the blandest, most unoriginal game I've played in months with the landscape deformation feature clearly being the game's sole gimmick (and a completely silly one at that if you think about it). That the game got 4/10 from EG is of absolutely no surprise to me... I wasn't even thinking of renting it never mind playing it and the demo was deleted long ago. With the large number of potentially great games out over the next 10 weeks you'd be a fool to buy this IMO. The only way it would impress anyone is surely if they'd slipped through a timewarp from five years ago and have never played a third-person shooter?
  • rhubarbandcustard #23 3 years ago

    Worth Playing scored this 85
    Daily Game scored this 79
    Gamer 2.0 scored this 74

    Eurogamer score this 40

    Eurogamer LOL!!!
  • Zebula77 #24 3 years ago

    Judging from the demo, this review is spot-on. The terrain deformation looked kinda interesting in the demo, but it was painfully obvious how you could only do it in select places, which I found very limiting. Main character is boredom in a space-suit and the story seems bland as well.

    Nah, deleted that demo long ago.
  • rumrum4444 #25 3 years ago




    Well done !

    The 4/10 is too low because of the hype.

    fracture promised and did not deliver.

    Therefore i think 4 is acceptable.

    .
  • viper_h #26 3 years ago

    WTF's up with the comments? N@ posts a response at 07:56:29 to a message posted at 09:41:17? Time travel anyone?
  • spookyzombie #27 3 years ago

    A 4/10 is about right. It's just not very slick and becomes a chore to play. The demo was short and quite varied. This may be the reason why people can't understand a 4/10 score for the full title.
  • mingster #28 3 years ago

    The most interesting thing about this game is the freaky comments thread with people responding to comments before they have happened which is extremely bizarre.

    I keep thinking of populous for the best ground deformation in a game.
    Edited by 1 at 10/10/08 @ 11:36
  • Hunam #29 3 years ago

    4!? Christ? I really enjoyed the demo...

    Conflicted, Tom is usually right (that is, my opinion usually sides with his) on these things but I still want to dip in. It can't be worse than Turok/Timeshift/Turning Point can it?
  • actionfitz #30 3 years ago

    so,
    not better than halo then?
  • BobsUncle #31 3 years ago

    1500 multiplayer games endured achievement = please keep playing our game.
  • dryden555 #32 3 years ago

    I'm looking forward to Dead Space rather than Gears 2 myself.
  • Darren #33 3 years ago

    @dryden555 - Me too... in fact, I'm looking forward to Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and Silent Hill: Homecoming more than Gears of War 2 but only because I know exactly what to expect from Epic's sequel, i.e. more of the same but prettier and gorier.
  • Farzlepot #34 3 years ago

    You know, I started reading this, then my boss called me away for something. When I came back I continued reading, forgetting exactly what the title of the game was, and started thinking I'd clicked on the Gears of War 2 hands-on by mistake. I even got confused when you mentioned the name of the guy you control.
  • creepylizard #35 3 years ago

  • Monkey_Puncher #36 3 years ago

    Game looks like Brute Force with explodable floors, in other words completly shit.
  • Lamont #37 3 years ago

    4/10? This game is reprehensibly derivitive but it's nowhere near as ghastly as an embarassment like Haze. There's passively bad and then there's actively bad. I say 6/10 is about right.
    Edited by 1 at 11/10/08 @ 07:02
  • OneMoreSunday #38 3 years ago

    If you click the "Reviews" link on this page, it says Fracture's score is 8 out of 10 instead of 4 :I
  • saku_luk #39 3 years ago

    They should have done what Atari did....no demo = get suckers to buy your game = profit!

  • T4RG4 #40 3 years ago

    Wow, Eurogamer scoring harshly! Good to see. Personally I (and a number of friends actually) thought the demo was extremely poor. In its ownright, not strikingly bad by any means but held up against similar games it offers nothing.

    Deformable terrain is not a strong point to build a game around IMO - smacks of tech leading design.
  • Gearskin #41 3 years ago

    Thought the demo was fun.
  • mad-sirf #42 3 years ago

    i played fracture(360) and i'm sorry it's never a 4/10, i had a lot of fun, everything is working well and the grounddeformation is fun too
    in this review all is written down to crap, i coud not found any of it, very strange or?????

    it's for sure a 7/10 and nothing less

    on eurogamer.de the Ps3 version got 8/10 and it's exactly the same game ;)
  • Wezi #43 3 years ago

    Another review here, doesn't bode so well for the game either - http://pa rentalguidanceuk.blogspot.com/2...