LucasArts unveils Fracture

LucasArts and Day 1 Studios have unveiled Fracture, a third-person shooter built around terrain deformation set for release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in summer 2008.

Fracture thrusts players into the futuristic boots of Mason Briggs, a demolitions expert fighting for the cybernetically enhanced Atlantic Alliance against their ideological adversaries, the genetically enhanced Pacificans.

Their setting is a ruined vision of the United States, where the melting of the polar ice caps has had some unhelpful repercussions. By 2161, when the game is set, the Mississippi River has risen and cut the country in half.

That's not the only change though, because scientists (and, for that matter, next-generation console hardware) have mastered proper terrain deformation, and so lots of your weapons are made to strategically reshape the environment.

You've got the tectonic grenade, which blasts ground upward to help access new areas, a vortex grenade that creates a tornado-like effect useful for attacking enemies surrounding Mason, while your rocket launcher's alternative fire helps burrow under obstacles by creating massive craters with subsonic blasts.

It all amounts to a game world that "simply isn't possible in the previous generation of consoles," according to LucasArts' Peter Hirschmann. Expect to see more of Fracture in the near future, and in our screenshot gallery sort of now