It’s “pretty standard” according to Jet Brody. He’s our protagonist, or at least would be if he had any character, and though he’s commenting on the tutorial’s introduction to the HUD, he might as well be talking about Fracture as a whole. It’s a game so unerringly standard, it could be sold flat-packed for home assembly – the accompanying Swedish instructions reading ‘insert charmless meathead A into anodyne shooter environment B’. Yes, your health recharges like in Halo. Yes, your power-armoured avatar has a roady-run like in Gears. Yes, locations feature both lava and luminous green slime. Freedom is under threat from a megalomaniac hoping to do mischief with – yes – a giant robo-spider. The game also comes fitted with regrettable driving sections. It’s all pretty standard.

So far, so five. But if the only thing you could say about Fracture was that it managed to pinpoint the very definition of mediocrity, then it would be a better game than it is. The dips below baseline competence come more frequently as the game progresses – there’s a smattering of glitches, weird checkpointing decisions, tedious puzzle design and an appalling boss battle that you have to fight several times over by the game’s ending. All of which might have been forgivable had Fracture ever dared to interest you with its dim enemies or limp weaponry. Things explode with titillating excess and the arsenal has a certain flamboyant variety, but combat is universally sludgy in feel and the stingy supply of ammo for the more exciting tools often leaves you resorting to the standard-issue pea-shooter.

Sad to say, what irks most of all is the one glittering bead of innovative spirit that the game possesses. This is the game’s terrain deformation, which, in early viewings, held the potential to elevate the game from generic trappings, voiding the linear conventions of the genre by enabling players to carve their own routes through the world. Instead, using Brody’s arm-mounted Entrencher device, the player can only raise and lower the terrain in certain areas, and only to a certain degree. You can pump up a lump of soil in one place, but a thin layer of tarmac thwarts your efforts elsewhere. While it’s useful for creating cover, Day 1 has found the only way in which it could implement such a mechanic without it actually having any meaningful effect on the game’s structure whatsoever. Buildings and large objects are unaffected, unless they form part of a contrived puzzle. Raise the ground to push some giant plug into its socket, or restore a broken walkway; lower the ground to remove a piece of concrete from the path of a laser beam. There’s nothing organic about these puzzles, and, while they are rarely difficult to work out, there is something strikingly false about the way the world is rigidly categorised into immovable, scripted or physics-enabled objects.

Fracture is a game that had one good idea, stopped there, and then decided that was too risky as well. Given that its bland combat is little enhanced by the ability to create cover, you suspect that the promises made for the technology have simply dug its own grave.

4/10