The Life and Adventures of Jet Brody
Fracture has some interesting features, but it's not much fun.
Published: November 4, 2008
The visuals in Fracture are technically proficient, but artistically bankrupt. Jet Brody has the appearance of an Unreal Tournament character but with less panache, jogging around the battlefield with a shorn cranium and a load of seemingly extraneous lights in his XTREME SPORTS armor. Jet Brody's foes look like action figures that were taken out of the mold prematurely. The environments sadly fail to capitalize on the potentially intriguing post-environmental apocalypse America setting. (Apparently, that lake in Ohio got a tad too big.) A general deficiency of color sometimes causes enemies to blend into the background, though Jet Brody has a handy radar widget to help with that. On the positive side, the undulating dirt and various other special effects are very nice looking. Sometimes the destruction is absolutely glorious. There are some cool vehicle designs, though when Jet Brody is required to pilot one, it is about as exciting as the phrase "obligatory vehicle sequence" would suggest.
Fracture is a sonic disaster. The music is good, but it sounds like the result of a higher-up saying, "Make it sound like John Williams!" Sound effects range from unremarkable to abhorrent; some of the weapon sounds are intensely irritating. The voice acting is generally good, but the dialog is drivel. The biggest problem with the sound, however, is that it is broken. The music has a tendency to stop playing, though not as an intentional atmospheric touch. Sound effects are routinely dropped, which can pull the player out of the action quite abruptly. On a few occasions I've had the sound take on a buzzing, crackling aspect, which could only be rectified by completely restarting the game software. It probably won't blow up your monitor, but Fracture may prompt you to question the health of your sound system.
There is a surprisingly tasty booze-spiked gooey bit hidden at the center of this turd cordial, and that is the multiplayer component. All of the goofy weapons and abilities that seem to serve no real purpose in the campaign combine to make a chaotic and fun multiplayer experience. The expected objective-based modes are represented with a couple of twists that take advantage of the terrain deformation. Playing with other humans sidesteps one of the biggest problems with the game, which is the idiot savant AI. Credit is due to the designers of Fracture's online modes for spinning shit into gold; well, maybe not gold, but at least something inoffensive like pewter. It's a shame that Fracture wasn't built from the ground up as a multiplayer-centric game. Of course, had that happened, the world would have been spared the badical extreme duditude of Jet Brody, and that would have been a tragedy.
