When a Game Mechanic Isn't Enough

(a little rant after (re)playing some games as I’ve been recovering, here you go)

You ever played a game with a really cool mechanic? But still, somehow, didn’t keep your interest? Or maybe it did, but no one else seems to share your enthusiasm?

A few games from my youth come to mind when I think of “killer mechanic, but not much else”: Split-Second, Fracture, Haze, Section 8, and Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. Let me go over them, why they fit that criteria, and why the studios were not rewarded with success.

Split-Second

Imagine a TV show following a series of races, taking place on “sets” rigged to blow. Racers trigger them with “power plays.” These power plays can change the track dramatically — from construction cranes opening new routes to an airplane or battleship crashing on top of you.

I played the heck out of this game on my Xbox 360. Also bought and played the heck out of it on the PC port. A surprising variety of levels “tied” into each other.

So why did this game not last? True, the studio collapsed soon after its release (same goes for many of the others on this list, but regardless, none made enough money for a sequel except Section 8).

One thing I quickly noticed during a replay: tension is quickly lost once the few big power plays happen. Apart from the simpler power plays, most can only happen once.

And like a whodunnit movie, the “magic” indeed fades once you’ve seen and played through most power plays. And once that fades, the racing that’s left is pretty mediocre. Drifts aren’t even necessary for time trials; just get a car that “bounces” off railings and learn your lines.

It’s certainly fun, but the game is more of a “a yearly weekend binge” than a "play for hours every day.”

Fracture

Fracture takes place in a future, where the world utilizes terraforming to save itself from the effects of global warming. America is thrown into a new civil war, split into two ways of improving the human race: genetic engineering, or just “cyborg”-ing ourselves (…wait a minute, is this just Deus Ex?).

The key gameplay mechanic is the terraforming. You can raise and lower any solid earth to your liking, accessing new areas and manipulating the battlefield, gaining cover or throwing enemies out of cover.

I heard lots of people online rave this game. I remember the marketing being cool to see at the time. So why didn’t it (or its company) last?

I recently gave it a try. The terraforming certainly is a new angle and makes for a few interesting platforming puzzles. But the firefights (singleplayer and multiplayer) become either a grenade fest or just circling each other, shooting a hail of energy bolts, until enough lucky hits grant a kill. Zooming for long-range combat is clunky.

In short, the terraforming doesn’t “wear off” like Split-Second, but it doesn’t affect the core gameplay too drastically.

Haze

Haze has an interesting premise. This profanity-laden sci-fi military game (you are a soldier, after all, but this one strangely has more F-bombs than any other I’ve played) is about soldiers who use … uh, how do I make this kid-friendly-ish … prescribed injections to make themselves perform better.

These injections give the player benefits: easier targeting, better resistance against bullets, etc. However, if you take too much and “overdose”, you start losing control of your character.

Fascinating idea, and the world is initially interesting. But it doesn’t last. Despite overhyped marketing, it failed to meet expectations, with its subpar graphics (huge letdown for a PS3 exclusive release) and otherwise mediocre gameplay. Enemies are mostly cannon fodder, and the “overdose” side effects rarely come into play.

Wish I could say I finished the campaign at least, but I wasn’t even motivated to do that.

The studio, Free Radical Design, fell into bankruptcy. Even sadder, not the biggest surprise.

Section 8

I really liked this one as well: a sci-fi battlefield-like shooter, all about capturing command points and reducing enemy’s reinforcements. Its biggest mechanics:

• No spawn points; you just drop from the sky. There is a fun gamble to either fall fast and land quickly while taking a hit to your shields, or fall slowly/safely but risk getting shot.

• You could also orbit-drop different tech like AA guns, mechs, tanks, etc.

• You traverse the big maps by super-sprinting, called “overdrive"

However, this game is otherwise a pretty generic shooter. Not to mention balance issues, either no particular differences between weapons or drastically OP (one particular machine gun was both highly accurate and high damage).

Timegate Studios actually managed a sequel soon after, with Section 8: Prejudice released to Xbox Arcade. But to no avail.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War

I recently got to play this classic. Yes, its (famously patented) Nemesis system blew everyone’s minds at the time, and in many ways, it still does.

Some of my favorite features:

• Diversity of enemy immunities, strengths, and weaknesses balanced button-mashing with strategy.

• Orcs cheating death or swearing vengeance for their dead blood brother adds a nice dynamic.

• Middle-Earth swordplay hasn’t been better.

• Cutscenes are very well done, especially the backstories regarding how the Nine became Nazgul.

As I played through the main campaign (normal mode — I don’t have time for grind), I learned quickly:

• Nemesis only feels as vast as its diversity of orcs. After conquering a land or two, I quickly found captains with the same names, titles, and/or voices. One could argue that a species used as war fodder should have little genetic diversity, but lore isn’t a good argument for gameplay.

• After ranking up, you can kill most captains and warchiefs by just juggling a few methods (only so long as they’re not immune to all of them). Or just upgrade your gear to OP status. Or distract them with a ton of reinforcements.

• Speaking of gear: apart from a few choice perks, gear soon becomes meaningless thanks to countless currency.

• Story is underwhelming. Characters grant little emotional investment, with one notable exception (Brûz —if you know you know — but mostly irrelevant to the main story). Ending has some twists, but that’s about it.

• Lore is thrown out the window. How important is Middle-Earth lore consistency? Up to you, to be honest. I just assumed this was a “what-if” scenario and didn’t lend itself to the LOTR storyline. But it may bother some more than others.

• Despite a great diversity of locations, some feel unnecessarily big. They all have a same-ness too due to lots of reused assets (despite the 100GB storage I mentioned earlier).

I am being a tad picky. But despite its patent, sadly this series does not have further sequels. And at a time when lootboxes became infamous, the game’s initial use of them wasn’t helping.

That game was released in 2017. In 2021, Monolith Productions were supposedly working on a Wonder Woman game. It never happened. The studio closed down this year, in 2025.

Why did these all fail?

These games all have a few things in common. The big one is that they are high-concept games from small(ish) studios, trying to break into a well-laid genre.

It’s hard to market past Halo, Battlefield, and Burnout to get people to buy your game. Being an underdog, you have to really market other things. Like uniqueness. A killer gameplay mechanic (Split-Second) or a fascinating new world (Haze and Fracture) often fits the bill.

These were all certainly unique, and fun enough for some players who did play them.

So why have we (or at least, most of us) moved on? What else was needed?

Mechanics must (drastically) affect gameplay

I noticed this while playing Haze. While the injection mechanic is interesting, it never really changed how I played. It just highlighted enemies from otherwise hard-to-read graphics and made me survive longer. My play style never really changed other than “inject yourself every once in a while.”

Same with Fracture. Terraforming is a cool platforming mechanic applied to a shooter, but I often just ended up shooting and jumping to dodge rockets till enemies dropped.

Sounds an awful lot like Halo without the terraforming, huh?

Sometimes the mechanic does affect play style, but inconsistently. Split-Second power plays drastically affect the race outcome and track. But in the doldrums, when most of the big plays have happened or just no one is triggering them, it becomes a basic arcade racing game where it’s really hard to catch up to other racers.

If you have a killer mechanic, a good tip I heard is to ensure your game can’t be played the “normal” way. Or make that more acceptable on an easy difficulty. But games often require learning to play a certain way.

While certainly an extreme, Dark Souls is revolutionary for creating the “souls-like” genre because it enforces a certain unforgiving, but rewarding, playstyle. Even multiplayer shooters like Call of Duty and Fortnite play very differently due to their mechanics.

A lack of polish

Sometimes, the mechanic itself is fine, but the rest of the game just isn’t.

Haze is dramatically guilty of this with its graphics, let alone gunplay. But even with Section 8, you can tell the difference of gunplay compared to something like Battlefield: time to kill (TTK), balance of accuracy to damage, gun “feel” between weapons, etc.

High concept games like these prioritize their gameplay mechanics over other nuances (these are smaller studios, after all). However, it’s these “little” nuances and polish that often keep players engaged once the big mechanics’ flare starts to wear off. They also help keep multiplayer balanced and fair.

Game Balance

Speaking of, balance is an important part of games, especially shooters.

Super Smash Bro’s creator talked about game balance in one of his videos. In short, you have to be okay with being overpowered in some areas, so long as there’s equivalent weaknesses. With Mario Kart, the blue shell is overpowered, but it only applies to first place racers. Mario Kart does this intentionally to be a more casual game. But it does have a strategy.

Game designers often talk about making weapons or enemies “orthogonal”, or play so differently such that there isn’t one that’s always better or worse. By having each weapon and enemy require different play styles, it forces players to think more on their feet than just “shoot longer.” Doom’s enemies are great examples of this.

I noticed a struggle with orthogonality in Shadow of War. Nemesis system’s immunities force players into different strategies. However, you can still juggle a few strategies to handle nearly all types of enemies, nullifying the need to truly diversify.

Conclusion

To be clear, some of these are great games. I would still recommend Split-Second and Shadow of War to others. If these were created in an indie scope and budget, they might’ve had a better margin of profit.

But that wasn’t the goal of these studios. It was to break into the industry.

The kind of success to survive, let alone “break in,” is changing. Profits and margins are changing. Studios, even small studios, risk so much more by going big nowadays. Same goes for films, animation studios, and other creative mediums.

So, what are we to do?

Think of modern successes in indie music, podcasts, YouTube, or Twitch. What do they all have in common?

Niches. Niches, thanks to more discoverable social media, can survive. You still need to have polished work, but you don’t have to appeal to everyone to get success.

For art, games, and movies that appeal to the broader, bigger audiences (from Marvel movies to Call of Duty), leave that to the big studios. Focus on your little community, your little band of followers. Work within your limitations.

Then, if you do break into the industry, you’ll have the flexibility to further expand on your ideas and execution.