LucasArts, most famous for the development of all video games Star Wars related, recently decided that they would become one of the top game makers in the world. It started with the release last month of The Force Unleashed and today marks the second attempt at greatness, and it goes by the name Fracture (Day 1 Studios). This game is unique in many ways, the most obvious being the player’s ability to deform the game’s terrain. With a quick press of a button gamers are able to either raise or lower the ground (as long as it is made of dirt, snow, etc. Using the terrain deformation gun will also dictate which path the player takes throughout the entire game’s ingenious level design. This simple gameplay feature is what sets Fracture apart from other “Gears of War” clones and helps elevate it into the “worth your money” category.
The storyline of Fracture is simple, well not exactly simple but still nothing you couldn’t read in the latest science fiction novel. Our hero, Jet Brody, is a soldier in the Atlantic Alliance whose sole cause is to defeat all things evil. The most evil creature in Fracture is a guy known as General Nathan Sheridan, formerly an Atlantic teammate but now with the Pacific army and therefore your arch-nemesis. There are other plot lines revolving around dead relatives, biomedical experimentation, and long walks on the beach but for the most part you get the just used to setup the game’s plot. For the most part the story does it’s job progressing the gameplay and keeping the user attentive; there are a couple parts where it gets quite confusing and complicated, still we wanted to finish the game just to find out what happens and that’s a good sign.
As we mentioned above the main draw of Fracture is something LucasArts has coined “terrain deformation”, the twist is that both sides of the battle can use the technology. This adds an entirely new aspect to a third-person action game, something we have never seen or experienced before. Fracture is broken into three decisive and different acts, each taking between three and four hours to complete. This clocks the total time in around ten hours, which is about average for a game of this genre. The game flows in a fine manner and there were few times where we got bored while playing.
The ability to manipulate the battlefield whenever we wanted was one of the only things that kept Fracture from becoming too repetitive (it still was a bit). Never once did a battle unfold the same way it did before, even if we died and had to replay the exact same section of a level. Each of the three acts is also unique enough to keep the player interested (snow, dirt/sand, and grass). One of our main concerns when we first heard about Fracture was that it would just be too difficult for players to make effective use of the terrain deformation feature, we couldn’t have been more wrong. Day 1 failed when creating the enemies in the game, they are uninspired and repetitive, even quite boring by the end of the game.
We have to admit that while great in conception there are times when the feature failed miserably, specifically one of the few driving (we use that word loosely) levels in the game. Other than that though we had a great time creating cover on the fly and attempting to traverse a level design never used before in this medium. From the first level through the last cut-scene, the developers made sure to force the gamer into this aspect of gameplay. At any time during play you can activate terrain deformation by pushing either the RB (up) or the LB (down) buttons respectively. After just a few hours of play we felt as though we were experts with the feature, moving the ground up and down with ease of a Malibu developer.
