Fracture

Once you get over how boring the game looks though it's clear that the gameplay itself has a lot more to say for itself. Even just having the desert level played at us by LucasArts it all looks great fun as you watch mountainous cover being created with a single button press, incongruous stacks of crates and concrete pipes fly into bad guy's faces and observe cleverly circuitous routes being taken around bad guys by digging under the ground or climbing above it.

Elsewhere there was still no sign of any vehicles to drive about in, but they are still apparently in the game. If we had to make a blind guess we'd imagine that one looks like a warthog and the other is a sort of ATV. Although naturally we all hope and pray for flying motorbikes.

The best bit from the vehicle-less desert section involved some mutated dog monsters (which look like the Zerg from StarCraft) tunnelling around under the ground like the worms from Tremors. The LucasArts chap had clearly dealt with their sort before though and was able to dig them out of the ground with the Entrencher and fling them into the air with a Spike grenade.

Disappointingly little time was allowed for us to actually play the game ourselves, as we were only allowed to work through the tutorial level which will itself be released as a demo in August or September.

The only problem with playing the tutorial level is that every puzzle and objective is spelled out in excruciating detail, making it difficult to tell how obscure or experimental later obstacles will become. According to the producer though things do all become less obvious as soon as the game feels you've found your feet.

What we did get to experience though was the simple joys of messing about with the terrain and raising up the earth across the level until it was as pockmarked as a teenager's face during a Clearasil shortage. Heaving up the earth to protect yourself as you circle round to take out a turret is definitely great fun, as is making use of the welcomingly imaginative range of non terrain-deforming weapons.

The torpedo launcher proves particularly good value as you fire it into the ground and then watch it tunnel along before detonating it under a suitably large throng of enemies. There's also a mine-firing gun, which allows you to explode UN-unfriendly explosives at a time of your choosing.

Plus there's the ice gun, which not only freezes enemies, allowing you to smash them into ice cubes, but also enables you to freeze the ground so that it can't be interfered with for a while. (Later on in the game the enemy gets to use its own Entrenchment tools.)

Talk of a 12-player online mode sounds particularly alluring once you start to experiment with the tactical possibilities offered by the game's weapons. As a chat with the LucasArts producer later revealed, play-testers just love moving objects around the map with the Entrencher, even though it was never meant to be used that way, and so this has been encouraged in multiplayer maps and incorporated into some of the later puzzles.