E3 2008: Fracture Hands-On

E3 2008 is literally earth-shattering, thanks entirely to one game: Fracture. That's right, in Fracture you actually shatter, flatten, deform, and swell the earth upon which you run, jump, crawl, and hide behind. At its core, this upcoming game from LucasArts is a pure shooter with lots of cool weapons, intense gunplay, and a timely, nuanced plot. What sets it apart is your degree of control over the field of battle itself. Whereas other games let you blow up crates, trees, and shacks with guns, grenades, and rockets, Fracture is different.

Set in the year 2161, the Earth and its people are suffering from global warming. In America, there are two factions that have different approaches to dealing with the worsening climate, and they are locked in a bitter dispute. On the west coast, the Pacificans have taken to genetically altering themselves, but have these measures cost them their humanity? The East Atlantic Alliance thinks so, and instead of messing with Mother Nature, they've been decking themselves out with cybernetic implants to stay ahead of the warm-weather curve. Whose ideology will win out? That's up to you and your awesome powers to decide.

One of the prime outlets of your warlike will is the entrencher, a device that gives you the power to raise and lower the terrain as you see fit. Is a bad guy hiding behind a hill? Flatten it with your entrencher, and then flatten him with a headshot from your machine gun. Or, if you have a rhino gun, you can suck stone from your surroundings into a large boulder and toss it at him for a deadly game of catch. The catapult gun is also an interesting weapon that hasn't been seen until E3; it fires shots that ricochet, and you can press the fire button at any time to make the shots explode.

You'll want to press away nonstop because the visual effects in Fracture are so impressive that every explosion is worth your time and ammo. You should know intuitively that any game that actively lets you reform its very terrain would have to have an extremely powerful, versatile engine, and this expert engineering also manifests itself whenever things go boom. The particle effects are robust and ubiquitous, the pyrotechnics are frightening, and the frame rate is as solid as a rock. Or in the case of Fracture, much more solid than a rock.

Although the terrain-deforming effects have several interesting uses in combat, they also play a large role in getting from point A to point B. Is a doorway covered in rubble? Lower the earth until it's exposed. Need to get up to a platform? Raise yourself on a hill and walk right up there. Fracture will give new meaning to the phrase "environmental puzzles."

Keep in mind, though, that Fracture's developers were very careful not to pin themselves under the weight of a new play mechanic; Fracture is still first and foremost a shooter, which we experienced in our play-through of one of the first levels. We certainly did our share of shifting and shaping the terrain, but most of all we were running around, tossing grenades, dodging bullets, and popping off headshots with all manner of machine guns, sniper rifles, and rocket launchers. But though the controls were instantly familiar, Fracture was still very challenging thanks to aggressive and unusual enemies. In particular, the hydras gave us fits by jumping in high, parabolic arcs and raining down rockets on us. We had to predict where they'd land while dodging their fire, and then toss off a rocket of our own and hope that the blast caught them when they landed. We eventually succeeded, but the fight was definitely a challenge, and this was pretty early on in the game. Much is known about Fracture, and yet we get the feeling that we've been shown only the tip of the stalactite when it comes to what this earth-moving game has to offer. We can't wait to dig into more when this game ships for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 sometime in October of 2008.