5. Fracture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MV6ztPF4OE Red Faction: Guerrilla was based almost entirely around a single gimmick, making it perfect demo-fodder, as in short bursts you could milk this for all the destructive capabilities it was worth. The hook was that you could manipulate the environment using landscape-shifting grenades and a gadget called The Entrencher (which also sounds like a terrible name for a professional wrestler) to raise and lower things to suit your whims. The demo made the most of this mechanic as you used it to catapult enemies into the air, raised piles of earth to make cover for yourself and generally mess about. For the main game though, it was a huge letdown. For starters, the game's big sell - manipulating your surroundings - was incredibly limited. It didn't work on concrete, only exposed earth, which mean that in any of the copy n' pasted dull grey concrete interiors, the ability to change your surroundings might as well have been non-existent. The fact that the game's demo almost entirely took place with soily earth all around you made it feel even more like a cheat. There were some puzzles that involved using your ground-shaping weaponry, but they were all so obvious that they counted more as chores than detective-work. Finally, the game suffers from what's becoming a trend in this article: having one main moveset that, in the confines of a short tutorial, seems brimming with potential, but when it's never developed over the course of a flat, uninteresting game, leaves you feeling bored and deeply let down.