In the fairly distant future of 2161, turns out Al Gore was right and a lot sooner than anyone expected—global warming has taken hold and flooded out a lot of the planet, including major chunks of the Midwest for some reason and the coasts.  In order to prevent the total destruction of the coastal states, new technologies emerge that can reshape the landscape with the press of a button, forming valleys where there were cliffs and cliffs where there were valleys, allowing threatened areas to easily build bulwarks of land against the oncoming floodwaters.

The United States has been split in two at about the Mississippi River, with the United States operating out of Washington D.C. and the new offshoot, the Republic of Pacifica, functioning out of its new capitol of San Francisco, which probably should’ve been flooded right along with most of California if the Pacific goes up as much as expected.  Anyway, Pacifica’s embraced genetic modification as a way of life—those crazy Californians!—and they’re now at odds with what’s left of the United States, who thinks that genetic modification on a grand scale is so immoral that they’ve declared it illegal, choosing instead to focus on the technological prowess of man.  And thus, the two republics find themselves at war in the future.

When I said that it was going to try and differentiate itself using some pretty weak methods, I meant it.  First, it’s not a hundred percent accurate to call Fracture a first person shooter, because you are not merely behind the gun—you are behind the entire CHARACTER.  As far as I’m concerned this is a toe-MAY-toe / toe-MAH-toe sort of difference, but that’s just me, and really does little overall to separate this from the slew of first person shooters already out on the market.

Second, there’s been a lot of fuss about the “entrencher” gun, quite possibly the single unique feature about this game.  With it, you can raise and lower portions of ground, probably based on the same technology that I described in the plot synopsis above.  It’s nice to be able to make cover wherever you go, but would I play an entire game because it exists?  No, not a chance.  It’s a nifty feature, a sweet addition to the list of bells and whistles, but frankly, I wouldn’t ever play this game again.

Why?  Because it’s almost EXACTLY the same game as Too Human and Gears of War and Gears of War 2 and all those other games that we’ve been playing over and over and over again with virtually no distinguishing features except those in character and story and bells and whistles.

And while I’m at it, whose brain-damaged idea was it to name the game’s lead character “Jet Brody”?  I mean, come on—did you have a CONTEST and bring in some fourth graders, get them loaded on Pixy Stix and Red Bull and tell them to come up with the coolest action hero name EVER?  Did you pass on “Max Power” just because The Simpsons already did it?   Even Matt Hazard made a little more sense and that was a DELIBERATE parody.  Please stop insulting my intelligence by coming up with this crap.  Seriously.

Basically, there’s no real reason to play this game unless you’re absolutely desperate to start reshaping landscapes in video games to suit your own desires because you’ve already played this game about a dozen times over.  Fracture is yet another in a long string of miserable retreads that aren’t even worth a rental unless you can’t get enough first person shooter action.

LucasArts has recently announced that the demo for their latest title Fracture will hit both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 on September 18th.

Players will be given a chance to try out the unique Terrain Deformation which allows for the “dynamic creation of on-the-fly cover and geographic manipulation”.

Fracture is currently in development by Day 1 Studios, and will hit shelves for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 on October 7th.