Meet Jet Brody, a blank-faced white dude with a dumb name dressed in a bulky suit of armor that he apparently pilfered from Marcus Fenix's closet. Brody is the main character/empty vessel that you'll operate for the duration of Fracture.

The real star of the game, of course, is Day 1's much-hyped Terrain Deformation (TD). Using the bumpers on the Xbox 360 controller, you can raise and lower the terrain around you. Click RB, and the ground balloons like one of those Jiffy Pop popcorn tins. Click LB, and the same patch of ground suddenly pocks in like a big acne scar. Hit RB a few times in a row, and the Jiffy Pop tin continues to swell to new heights. A few taps on LB, and you'll have yourself a swimming pool-sized hole in the ground in no time.

Looks like the old sawmill bridge is out. And Lassie didn't even tell us.

Terrain Deformation makes a terrific first impression. It's great fun to wander around the game's opening level, carving up the earth, leaving a series of hills and valleys in your wake. You can manipulate the battlefield around you, digging trenches to protect yourself from enemy fire, or you can carve your initials in the ground. It's another example, like Spore and LittleBigPlanet, of the burgeoning gaming-as-self-expression trend.

In Fracture's early moments, you'll solve a few nifty puzzles using TD. None of these puzzles qualifies as a head-scratcher. But the first time that you find yourself at an apparent dead end, and it suddenly dawns on you that you have the power to dig your way under the object that's blocking your path, you'll experience one of those heavens-parting-mote-of-sunlight-shining-down-on-you gaming moments. It's empowering, to say the least.

Unfortunately, Terrain Deformation, and the game that's attached to it, both have some severe limitations.

Whew. Someone open a window. It smells like Halo in here.

Let's start with the game. The plot borrows heavily from Halo and Gears of War. Absolutely nothing about the story or characters feels inherently original. The backstory: In the 22nd century, the ice caps have melted, flooding the fly-over states, and thus turning the U.S. into two countries separated by a new body of water. Out West, the Pacificans, as they now call themselves, began fooling around with their DNA. But the purists in the East -- called the Atlantic Alliance -- decided they were against gene altering, and passed laws banning it. The Pacificans seceded from the U.S., and now it's up to you and your giant Marcus Fenix suit to fight these genetically altered freaks on behalf of the Alliance in (of all places) San Francisco.

Yes, cover will be sought. Yes, shots will be fired and grenades will be lobbed. Yes, enemy artificial intelligence is smart enough to flank you.

Take a few hits and your shield energy will be depleted. Hide somewhere for a few seconds and the shield will recharge. Various guns will be doled out early and often -- I honestly could never keep straight which rifle or blaster did what -- but you can only carry two at a time.

Sounds familiar, eh?

I don't know about you, but running over this bump makes me hungry for Jiffy Pop...

Sometimes you'll fight alone. Sometimes you'll have a couple of non-player characters fighting on your behalf (though they're basically useless). Fracture's objectives never get more ambitious than "Get From Point A to Point B and Try Not to Die." Sometimes bosses appear, but your battles with them, across the board, are anticlimactic. Even the final boss turns out to be a disappointment, not to mention relatively easy to bring down.

Day 1 also tacked on a vehicle level for some inexplicable reason. This vehicle, called a TDV-1 (bet you can't figure out what that acronym means), is like a low-carb version of Halo's Warthog. It even controls like the Warthog, using the same dual-stick control scheme.

The one truly impressive weapon in Fracture is the Vortex Grenade. Toss one of these into a crowd of enemies, and watch the resulting tornado quite literally hoover them up. Sadly, Fracture's most impressive weapon is so impressive -- and overpowering -- that Day 1 allows you to use the Vortex Grenade only two or three times throughout the game.

But Fracture's most unforgiveable flaw is its poor pacing. For the most part, it's a constant, white-noise march of levels and enemies that eerily resemble the levels you just visited and the enemies you just fought. To be fair, you'll occasionally see a fat enemy, or one that appears to be on fire and is able to jump to great heights; and there's a gopher-like creature called a Creeper that attacks you from underground. But mostly what you get is the same batch of green, pointy-faced bad guys over and over again.

The first time there's any hint that anything truly dramatic might happen is when a massive creature reveals itself near the end of the game's first act. "I'm going to need a bigger gun," Brody says. Fracture does allow you to board that massive creature on a couple of occasions. But instead of a Scarab-esque moment ? la Halo 2 and Halo 3 -- and, man, was I ever ready for one -- this, too, turns out to be a tease. You climb aboard the creature's foot, begin battling the enemies that live in its foot, and once you've killed them all, the game tells you to get off the foot. And (small spoiler) even when you do finally kill this thing, you never really get to see more of its interior other than its damn foot.

Go ahead and try to knock me off this long, hard, red, veiny piece of rock!

Multiplayer extends the game's shelf life with the usual Capture the Flag-style modes coupled with Terrain Deformation. From the matches that I played, few of the players I found online bothered to employ TD at all, preferring instead to treat the game as a more traditional run-and-gun experience. Some of the multiplayer modes, like Break-In and Excavation, attempt to make TD an inherent part of the multiplayer experience, with mixed results. Example: Excavation requires teams to burrow into the earth, revealing a glowing beacon. Activating the beacon -- a large spike/penis grows out of the ground -- earns the team points.

But for the duration of the single-player experience -- around 12 to 15 hours -- I kept waiting for something dramatic to happen. I kept waiting for the whole thing to come together, to cohere, to transcend itself. But it never really does.

Which reminds me of a story. During the late stages of Fracture's second act, I found myself stuck in a pit, with Creepers constantly attacking me from below. I used TD to try to raise the terrain to a height that would allow me to escape the pit and get to my next Point B objective. I kept hitting RB again and the again. Right bumper, right bumper, right bumper. The ground puffed and puffed, and then suddenly ? it would puff no more.

Each time I hit the right bumper, the terrain appeared to still be growing. But it wasn't. Like an amusement park ride, TD, I realized, had a height limit.

So I decided to go in the opposite direction. I hit the left bumper. Down, down, down I went, excavating my way underground, and, hopefully, out of the pit. But I hit a wall there, too. I came to a point where I could dig no further.

It was in this moment that I realized how shallow, in a very literal sense, Fracture is; it was in this moment that I realized that Terrain Deformation is almost entirely cosmetic. Terrain Deformation certainly looks impressive. But strip TD out of Fracture, and what you're left with an extremely pedestrian third-person shooter.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.