To call the core feature of Lucas Arts' latest IP "ground breaking" would be skating a little too close to bad pun territory for my comfort, so I'll just settle for calling the terrain deformation technology "pretty damn cool." Fracture, developed by Day 1 Studios, gives players the ability to manipulate the ground at their feet for a variety of practical purposes. If you can't reach higher ground by traditional means, uproot a column of rock to give yourself a boost. Create craters to slow enemies down and form small hills to create your own cover. As an added bonus, the force necessary to create these tectonic shifts is more than enough to deal heavy damage to any poor saps standing in the middle of the blast radius or crush their hapless carcasses between your newly created rock and an existing hard place. By the time the dust settles on a battle the combat zone, it will look completely different, with half-formed mountains blending into and out of craters. I recently took a trip down to Lucas Arts force the chance to see how well their new technology worked in a multiplayer context.

Terrain deformation is achieved through the use of a device called the Entrencher and a variety of grenades. The Entrencher works like a cross between a gun and an elevator, just point your reticule at the piece of ground you think needs remodeling and press the up button to form a hill or the down button to create a crater. Keep hitting the same spot to make the hill larger or the crater deeper. The Entrencher doesn't require any ammo but it's charge-based to ensure that players can't spam with it. The tectonic grenade creates hills, while the subsonic grenades create craters. Both have the added benefit of explosive properties, so even if you don't particularly need a hill or a crater at the moment, they can still be used for the old fashioned purpose of hurting enemies. The other two grenade types are more specialized, there's one that forms a spire of rock that shoots vertically out of the ground and a rare fourth grenade type called a vortex grenade, which creates a cross between a tornado and black hole.

I quickly discovered that grenades dominated the battlefield in Fracture, and anytime I found myself without them I was only a few seconds away from death. The major reason they figure so prominently in battle is because the standard weaponry, which were mostly slight variations on the traditional assault rifles, sniper rifles and rocket launchers, felt rather weak and unwieldy. The starting weapon in particular was incredibly underpowered to the point where most players caught in battle after respawning would forgo pressing the trigger entirely and rely instead on grenades and melee attacks. Personally, I hated the way the melee attack felt in the game, as there were several instances when I could have sworn I was in striking distance but failed to make contact. At other times, I nailed people from what felt like a significantly bigger distance. The other weapons on the map were more effective, but it felt like the more creative the weapons were the more difficult they were to get a handle on. The carbine and sniper-rifle equivalents felt great, but many of the explosive weapons require a post-launch detonation in the vicinity of the enemy to actually deal damage, and it was tough to get a feel for how far away the projectile was from the enemy in the heat of battle. It also didn't help that the explosive projectiles tended to travel at about the same speed my grandmother drives, so trying to use those weapons on someone that actually sees you was pretty much pointless.

With that in mind, the deathmatch modes I played weren't particularly enthralling. Everyone was bouncing around, hurling grenades without much rhyme or reason, and never really using the Entrencher for anything other than reaching higher ground. Ideally players would analyze the situation and use the appropriate type of grenade, but the game moves so fast that players can't really be bothered to think about say, using a hill-forming grenade on an enemy under an overhanging structure to crush them against the underside. Instead, most of us were just throwing out whatever grenades we had, using the terrain deformation to slow them down and counting on the accompanying explosions to deal damage. If any of us were so lucky that one of our grenades happened to have any other effects, well that was a bonus. There were other examples of scenarios where the game's fast and loose pace interfered with the thought processes Day 1 Studios were probably hoping for players to take. In some maps, powerful weapons and faster routes across the map could be found at higher ground, but getting up there took some ingenuity. Using the Entrencher couldn't get me high enough and even the spire resulting from a spike grenade came up short. It turns out I had to use the Entrencher to raise the ground and then use a spike grenade on the raised ground. Great, let me just keep these ten other guys at bay for the 30 seconds it will take me to set all that up.

The game shined brightest in the objective-based multiplayer modes like capture-the-flag, Excavation, and Kingmaker, because these modes provided plenty of obvious opportunity to use the Entrencher and the terrain deformation grenades for strategic purposes. Flags housed indoors could be given an extra layer of protection by raising the ground in the doorways to form walls. Obviously, the opposition would be able to take down those walls just as easily as they were created, but those falling walls are a nice heads up that the enemy's at the door and an extra few seconds worth of preparation. On the other hand, a group running back to their base with a captured flag could use the Entrencher to close up choke-points to keep chasing enemies at a distance. Map design also came into play quite well, specifically one map that featured a ravine of glowing, damage-dealing toxic goop twisting through it. Both of the bases had makeshift moat of the goop right outside, so any players attempting to escape with the flag would need a buddy to with them to form a land bridge with the Entrencher.

Excavation is a cute take on territories where players have to use their Entrenchers to dig for energy crystals that subsequently rise from the ground and must be protected until completely secured. The opposition has to destroy the crystals with gunfire and grenades before they can attempt to capture the point for themselves. The crystals were too tall to protect with Entrencher-created hills (at least, not if we didn't want to spend a significant amount of time building them), but surrounding them with deep craters gave us the advantage of higher ground when the enemy attacked. We found similar success with the same tactic in Kingmaker, a king of the hill variant, whenever the control point was outdoors. When it was indoors, we simply used the entrencher and tectonic grenades to push the ground up and squish the congregation of enemies surrounding the point against the ceiling.

I came out of the multiplayer demo impressed with the flexibility of the terrain deformation technology and excited about the potential it held for puzzles and scripted sequences in the single-player campaign, but I wasn't particularly smitten with the multiplayer experience. Granted everyone at the demo was still learning the ropes of the game by the time we had to leave, but all of the battles felt really loose and chaotic. Unless there's a tectonic shift in the game's multiplayer design and balance between now and the time it's released, I don't think the game will be able to pull players away from the likes of Gears of War 2 or Resistance 2. The single-player on the other hand, might warrant a serious look.