Fracture (View comments)

In the distant future, the United States will once again split into two sides. This time, it’s the east and west instead of north and south. Genetic human modification has become a huge controversy: the west coast is almost totally in favour of it while the east is against. The President of the United States has passed a bill stating that genetically modifying a human is a federal offence, causing the west coast to secede. At least, that’s the story of Fracture. You play as Jet Brody, a soldier for the Atlantic Alliance (the east coast). Your job is to capture the president of Pacifica (the west coast) at all costs.

The first thing I noticed with this game, almost immediately, is that it strongly resembles Halo. And I mean strongly. From the weapons, the settings, even Jet’s armor, the game feels a lot like a Halo knock-off. And not even a good one at that. The game-play is different though in the fact that it relies heavily on altering the ground with a weapon called the Entrencher. With it, you can raise or lower the ground to create cover, burrow under walls, or even raise debris out of your way. This is pretty neat at first, but it quickly looses it’s fun after the game makes you do it for almost every small task. It begins to feel very repetitive, especially since it doesn’t work perfectly and is very awkward to use.

That being said, I should tell you that a lot of the game is this way: repetitive and awkward. The combat is very difficult, not because of enemies, but because of the controls. There were many times where I’d die simply because I couldn’t get a good combination of cover and aiming abilities. Most of the time it is impossible to shoot anyone while behind cover. If your crouched, instead of shooting over the cover, you simply shoot whatever your hiding behind, forcing you to stand up and get hit by enemy fire while trying to aim. Even when you are aiming, the weapons have terrible accuracy and take a lot of ammo to take down one Pacifica soldier. Throwing grenades doesn’t work to well either. When attempting to throw a grenade through a window, no matter where you aim, the grenade will almost always land in the same exact spot. So if you miss the first time, you must move to a new location to try again. Grenades also seem to have little effect on enemies, typically just knocking them down instead of killing them.

Aside from the awkward controls and pathetic weapons, the game feels very over-done. While the story is unique, the game play feels a lot like a mix of past games. While sometimes a mix can be good, this game didn’t offer anything good to help it out. I felt like I had played it before, although I could never figure out what other game it reminded me of specifically. The graphics, most notably the suit or armor you wear, reminded me a lot of Halo or Gears of War, or some offspring of the two put together. While Gears of War is one of my favourite games and Halo wasn’t bad, this game managed to not have any of the joy of playing that those two games did.

Fracture attempted to be groundbreaking, literally, with it’s focus on ground altering, but it simply didn’t do it right. This game was hard to force myself to keep playing, especially when my hope of it redeeming itself was lost after the first several hours of playing.

Sound: 4

Graphics: 3

Story: 3

Gameplay Mechanics: 2

Replayability: 1