A momentary diversion on the road to the grave

Fracture

By Shepton on October 16, 2008 in Reviews

Final verdict: D-
Final playtime: A couple of hours. It wasn’t worth even finishing.

 

 

Ugh. I wasn’t expecting much but this turned out to be a terrible game. First of all, it’s another case of a game being difficult due to sheer vast numbers of enemies. Rather than posing a challenge in a one-on-one or one-on-small group scenario, it simply vomits enemies at you.

The game sucks so much that nobody actually plays it online. Seriously, no-one. A friend and I were trying to find games earlier. After ten minutes of trying, we found one game, with one person in it. After another ten minutes of waiting in that game, nobody joined, so we left. The guy was clearly so desperate for a game of Fracture, that he re-invited us three times each after we left, at which point I blocked communications. Who knows how many more invites he would have sent.

You don’t have any go-to backup weapon in the campaign. It’s another one of those games like Uncharted or whatever where you have to constantly pick up new weapons from your enemies. Your enemies that take horrendous amounts of ammo to kill. Melee attacks aren’t very effective, and it’s hard to judge if you’re even going to hit your target. Even if you do, the attack doesn’t seem to stun them very long and they simply melee you right back, resulting in what looks like a badly written slap-fight scene from Desperate Housewives.

All the weapons in the game seem surprisingly weak when you wield them, yet powerful when wielded by your enemies. Even the rocket launcher feels like a peashooter.

I found that the plot of the game was not at all compelling or interesting. It was just your average “SOME TERRORISTS ARE DOING TERRORISM” sort of thing, only set in a weird future where some people are a little bit too juiced up on shit and have armor that can’t possibly be of any real use on the field of battle other than making you a more visible target.

Fracture screenshot

Visually nothing special either. Oh, I guess I should talk about the whole terrain deformation shtick. Well, you can make hills, or holes. But not on solid concrete, only mud and rock can be moved around. It’s useful for reaching the next floor up in every building in the game. As such, all architects in the Fracture universe were like “So let’s build all of our structures without floors. Just leave the mud there, nobody will mind. What, you think in this world where terrain deformation is common and people can make hills and dig tunnels easily as long as the floor isn’t concrete, mud floors in all our tactical military buildings will be a problem? Shut up, faggot. I don’t see YOU with an architectural degree.”

Nothing more to say. The game just isn’t that good. I have no idea why I painted the demo in such a positive light when I talked about it. I guess because the demo stops just before the game gets utterly awful.

Final verdict: D-

Final play time: A couple of hours. It wasn’t worth even finishing.

Leave a Reply