A hour with:

Fracture:

Well it could have been worse I suppose.

One hour with this games gets you through the tutorial level as well as partially through the first level of game play.

This is basically what I got as far as plot and story line.   In the future due to global climate changes the world's appearance is vastly changed, a technology based around raising the surface terrain has been developed in order to raise up the shorelines and keep flooding to a minimal, but even with this technology the US has been divided by what I suppose is a gulf of water and the east and west coast have developed sperately.   The East Coast has baned extensive genetic manipulation and has gone with a more tech savy approach to issues such as military development.  The West Coast in protest has seperated from the US, formed a country/state called Pacifica where they have embraced gene manipulation as a way to advance their military.

Fine, whatever, lets blow some shit up.

The terrain transforming tech is of course now a weapon complete with grenades that alter the very ground.  As far as using the earth as a weapon, well....not so much.  Sure if you aim correctly you can raise the ground underneath your enemies and this apparently, even though it looks fairly slow has the ability to throw them lifeless to the ground around them.   Yeah...ok.  My main focus was to use these abilities, to both raise and lower  the ground to provide me with better cover.  Have a few enemies infront of you shooting at you, raise up a hill so they can't get at you.  Their weapon fire will start to degrade the size of the terrain, basically shooting down the hill, but it works for the main part so far.  Also, as everyone know, its always better to control the high ground, firing while running down a hill at a target is easier than firing at them from below and all that goodness.

Pros:   Fairly decent looking game, graphically it is comprable to many of the newer realease titles, I can see basically similarities in armor and outfit design to games such as Too Human and that other one, what the hell was it called again....I'm actually drawing a complete blank here but it was the big sci-fi RPG multichoice game that came out a little while back that I never really got into because it was to much work.  Anyway's so far the story naratory has a bit to be desired, but for what its worth so far its been kind of ok.  Not to cheesy but still, not very embracing.  You just don't give a shit what's going on in the story, at least I'm not caring to much so far.  You don't get drawn into the story like in DeadSpace or BioShock, its just something that occurs as you are playing the game, and that seems to be happening more and more with recent titles.

Cons:  Basically there is to much talking, for the amount of dialogue I have been subjected to so far in the game, I would think they would have said something that mattered....but nope, not so much.   The opposition for what it is worth has very little variances n appearence, I have come across what I have been told are three disctinct enemy types and I honestly don't see that big of a difference.  A game like Halo, they are different shaped, colored and you can tell at a glance what it is and what you are in for.  In fracture, they are pretty close to the same size, they all are essentially the same color and the ones that are supposedly harder to kill, don't seem to be all that harder to kill.  The weapons other than the grenades and the terrain gun are all pretty much equal and I only shift guns when it turns out I have run out of ammo, which seems to go away alot faster than it should.  Perhaps 5 rounds are coming out with evey trigger squeeze.   I also seem to have a repeated glitch where the right trigger rather than shooting my equiped weapon will shoot off the terrain gun, with is supposed to go off with the bumper bars, not sure why, I had plenty of ammo, but it happened several times last night.

Indifferents:  The controls are the same fair as you would expect.  The triggers are a bit annoying as I mentioned, firing a grenade and knowing which guns will zoom in and which ones won't is a pain in the ass and I don't like them.  Nothing makes this game unplayable in the least.   But I definately wouldn't suggest anyone go out and pay more than 15bucks for it, hell, if you can rent it, that's about all I would suggest.  Its not bad, but hell its not all that great, its in that grey area in between somewhere.   It doesn't seem to want to TRY and be excellent, it is quit happy just being mediocre, not that there is anything wrong with that....FFS look at my sentence structure, does it look like I have tried?

One a scall of 1 to 10?

I give it 6 balls of molten rock to the groin.