Fracture, released tomorrow, reminds me of Red Faction, the ancient PS2 game-with-a-gimmick. And like Red Faction, Fracture is all about manipulating your environment, though this time it's the ground that you get to play with. While Red Faction supposedly allowed you to shoot through corridor walls, in practice the destruction was so signposted that you may as well have been shooting open doors. Fracture is similarly limiting. The gimmick this time round is the ability to manipulate your terrain. This is impressive at first but it soon subsides, leaving you feel more like Bob the Builder than a super space marine as you settle into a pattern of raising and lowering the ground only when obviously needing to. And it is usually very obvious when you need to, for example, create a hill.

Take away the terraforming and you are left with a very average shooter. There's nothing new here, with Halo and Call of Duty 4 obvious inspirations. The graphics are as bland as the gameplay, with brown, blacks and greens doing their best to sap your enthusiasm. And that's assuming you have any left. Fracture is infuriatingly tough in places. Inconsistently placed checkpoints – which often mean a tedious retracing of steps – and a punishing number of enemies do little to make you love the game.
Fracture is clearly a tech demo that has been over-stretched into a game. With the rush of big titles hitting in the next few weeks the chances of Fracture setting the charts alight are slight. But if it does sell a sequel with a bit more freedom and a wider use of the powers could be worth waiting for. For now though, Fracture is unlikely to make the earth move for you.