Fracture Field has you build an army of drones and smash thousands of rocks

Fracture Field is a new idle/incremental quarry mining game that will have you frantically clicking all over your screw to smash through every rock possible.

Released in April from Type-Ten, the idea here like a lot of incremental clicker game is to progress through a vast upgrade tree to keep on pumping up numbers. It's an odd genre, with games that keep on going for hours and hours that you can leave on a second screen or minimized, to jump back in whenever you want. A good one for achievement hunters too with 98 of them to hunt down.

Starting off with nothing but a basic pointed stick, you gradually build up towards much faster and more impressive rock-cracking tools, along with an army of drones to do your bidding automatically. Eventually, the screen will be absolutely filled with things going on. You also start off only smashing through the most basic of rocks, but part of the upgrade tree is also unlocking more types to smash through with each bringing their own type of resource for you to upgrade through to the next rock type.

Of course, it gets steadily more involved the further in you go, and breaking through different types of rocks takes longer - until you get the needed upgrades to make a lot of them a single-click. But the progression here feels pretty great, you're always doing something if you actively choose to and there's always something more to work towards firmly at your own pace.

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It's so weirdly zen, your mind can just shut down while you're playing it. While that may seem like an odd thing to say, as that could be taken as a negative against it, here it plays to its strength as it nicely executes exactly what it sets out to do - get you to chill while you smash through everything on the screen. During my longest play session of it in one sitting, I was so focused and zoned into it that my lunch and coffee went completely cold. Woops.

There's a nice accessibility option included too - auto-clicking. No more holding down the mouse button, so you can save your fingers and just focus on the movement and making the most out of your main digging tool. Eventually, it becomes a funny clicker game of Whack-a-Mole but with rocks.

It's a game that's sort-of stuck between two genres. It is both a clicker incremental and a minor automation game with the drone system. The automation is a little basic at the start, but once you get further in you get the ability to grab multiple types of drones and then things get real busy.

Fracture Field definitely released with some major balancing issues, but the developer has been nice and active on tweaking and improving it with a few patches that have been great to see them respond to the feedback on it. One thing you will encounter are difficulty walls - where the hardness of certain rocks is suddenly that much more than the one before - it's a game of patience too. But, the drones help deal with this a lot, since you can set them to only mine down to a specific level to let you happily build up resources to upgrade elsewhere to make it easier.

Something it does quite cleverly is the system where you fracture the entire world. It's like a prestige system where you accrue a certain amount of resources to reset the entire world to start fresh. But, you get a new currency here to spend on various special permanent boosts. This is the main loop really, you need to do this multiple times or certain rocks take forever to get through.

I don't always get on with clicker / incremental games, but something about smashing rocks and expanding my little army of drones was just a bit too satisfying in Fracture Field. So if clicker games are usually your thing, and you want one that will take a bit longer to get through - this is absolutely for you.

That said, it's not perfect, nothing is. I do wish there was a bit more to do in it. Because you do reach a point each time where certain rocks become quite difficult and it becomes just a bit too much of a waiting game.

Played on Fedora KDE 44 with Proton 11 Beta, it has been a flawless experience. There's also a demo on Steam you can try before you buy. Smashing.