[PS3/360] Fracture Demo Impressions

At around last year’s E3, LucasArts showed some footage of a game called ‘Fracture’ and they captured my attention. The concept of altering the ground’s levels seemed interesting, so I kept this game under my radar. Now with the release of a demo, is it what I hoped for?

Well the first thing I couldn’t help but notice as soon as I got in the game is how compressed the menu and cut-scenes looked. They looked like a bad .wmv file was used for the game’s visuals. The actual game looked decent from a graphical aspect, but that just looked bad. I can’t say I know much about the story yet, so I’ll skip that and just move onto the actual game.

The demo starts with your main character in a ship, with a rather familiar looking outfit, but maybe that’s just me. The demo itself is mostly a tutorial, so you spend 90% of it learning how to do stuff. The first thing you learn? Altering the ground. It’s just as simple as pressing L1 for lowering it, and R1 for raising it. Simple eh? The D-Pad is used to switch around grenade types, the R2 is your main weapon, the triangle button makes you sprint exactly like Gears of War would, and the rest of the buttons are mapped out like your usual third-person shooter.

I have to say the demo was a rather dull presentation of what the full game might be like. It’s just one long tutorial for the most part, and to be quite honest, the whole raising/lowering the ground thing got old rather quickly and seemed like more of a gimmick to me. The actual gun-play is what really made me realize that. Aside from the interesting concept, everything else about the game is either borrowed from a more popular franchise, or is just taken from the Third-Person Shooter stock.

Too much of the demo was “lower the ground to get through!” or “raise the ground to get over that!” it was all too obvious. Some things were destructible and some weren’t. Whatever they told you to blow up was nice an explosive-y, but everything else just stood its ground. The enemy isn’t much to talk about. They just shot at you and… shot some more. The demo ended with you getting on a support ship after the guy you were supposed to catch got away, and that’s it.

Overall I can’t say I’m super excited about the full game anymore, but I will still check it out once it hits store shelves this October.

—Impressions: Poor—