Studying the behavior of rocks and other brittle materials under dynamic loading is of interest in different areas. Many tunneling and mining applications benefit from a better understanding of rock fracture: for instance, dynamic fracturing of rocks may be of use in hydraulic fracture for geothermal energy extraction by aiding in the initial cracking of the rock mass. Other ceramic materials have been tested for applications as personal protection equipment where protection against impact is desirable. To numerically simulate these dynamic phenomena, the phase-field method has been previously used, implemented mostly for software such as Comsol. In this work we have studied the response of rock and other brittle materials in a variety of different scenarios, ranging from quasi-static loading to impact tests, with a particular focus on those cases where inertia could play a more significant role. For this we have implemented the phase-field method in Abaqus/Explicit; our implementation makes use of user subroutines and a thermal analogy.