Systems: Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Release Date: October 18, 2005
You can check out my First Impressions on F.E.A.R. here and I will try not to rehash a lot of what I said in that article, but there will be the occasional overlap because how could there not be? The gist of this entire article, if you have no interest in reading my ramblings about a 17-year-old game, is that F.E.A.R. is not what I wanted it to be and that clouded how I felt about 80% of the game. Going into F.E.A.R. I was expecting a first-person horror and psychological shooter. What I got instead was a first-person shooter full of government and corporate espionage with a few horror and paranormal elements. I mean, the concept itself is fully paranormal in that you are the point man (and referred to as such) in a military organization that investigates paranormal situations with your current mission to locate a man who is psychically controlling an army of bio-enhanced super soldiers and prevent him from doing any more harm than he has already done.
Going into F.E.A.R. with that mindset held me back from thoroughly enjoying the game because there was a lot that I did enjoy. First, the combat felt great. The "A.I." of the enemies was some of the more thoughtful that I have come across, at least to some extent. There were a number of times when I recognized that the area I was in had multiple entrances and that I could easily be flanked if I did not quickly decide on a direction to go. Enemies would often take their time, trying to flush me out by using grenades or peppering the area with enough gunfire which would cause dust to build up reducing my own visibility, forcing me to either hold my position or head out into the open and risk being shot. However, because this is a video game that is meant to be beaten, the enemies were "programmed" to be loud when communicating with each other thereby giving away their position and sometimes their tactics. Often after entering a new stage or after a few empty hallways, you would hear a static voice yell out "All teams check-in," "All clear!" and "Shut up!"
The stages themselves I have mixed feelings on. If you were to ask me right now how many different locations there were for all 22 levels, I would tell you that there were four locations. There is the starting warehouse building. There is a corporate office building. There is a rundown building in an urban area. And there is an underground science lab. That is a lot of levels to have in so few locations and with the exception of the urban area, which only comprised three of the levels and each of those levels was either in a different building, or multiple buildings while traversing through narrow alleyways and blocked off streets. The rest of the game took place primarily in buildings, or at least it felt like it did. There was very little change of scenery and at times I felt like I was playing an online multiplayer shooter a la CS:GO. On one hand, I do appreciate that in the Armacham building levels (8-9 of them, so almost half of the game) I literally felt like I scoured the entire building as the series of levels starts you by dropping you off by helicopter on the near top of a building and you work/fight your way up and down most of the building, eventually exiting out through the parking garage. Those areas I feel like could have been condensed into three levels, cutting out a lot of the wandering halls, killing off a group of enemy soldiers, searching through offices and cubicles, and fighting off another group of soldiers this one with a heavy on their side.
There was some variation though between levels in terms of enemies as you did not fight the super psych troopers and their mid-level mini-boss tank variant. A few times you ended up fighting Armacham security forces who at first seemed to be less armored (although they were wearing what looked like standard issue kevlar vests, and ball caps, but for whatever reason, their group tactics were less predictable than the Replica forces and I found that I was wasting more ammunition and using up precious health packs any time I encountered a group of them.
At various levels midway through the game introduced ceiling-mounted turrets and heavily armored mini-mechs, REV6 Powered Armors, both of which were not overly difficult to take out, but just took a lot of bullets. A bullet sponge if you will. The REV6 Powered Armors were only slightly challenging in that because of the limited number of guns you could carry, three, if you did not have a high damaging gun like the [rocket launcher, laser gun], then you were really going to have a bad time. I always tried to have my dual pistols, an assault rifle, and whatever heavy artillery seemed to have the most ammunition available. Although if the game gave me the MOD-3 Multi Rocket Launcher leaning up against a wall and a stack of rockets on a nearby table, I could take the hint that I was headed towards something very heavily armored. In the last third of the game, phase-shifting/cloaking Replica Assassins were introduced which were initially terrifying because I was not sure what was going on, but after killing the first one, I was able to make semi-quick work of the rest by way of either the assault rifle. The drones were similar in that after their initial introduction they were pretty easy to pick off by aggroing one at a time.
Granted there was quite a lot of exposition that occurred in these stages, either through chatter from members of your team not on the ground, or by logging into a laptop that was left out for you to find. But you could just as easily blow through each stage without a care for the larger story being told and I do not think that would change at all how you might approach the enemies in the stage or your tactics. This is partly a criticism of the game itself, but I also acknowledge that having story elements, not in the forefront and having some of them hidden as discoverables (something I have talked about in the Amnesia series as well) is a mechanic that I am not a particular fan of, but I cannot think of a solid solution apart from having all of this information presented during cutscenes between stages.
It was only in the last quarter of the game that the game took a hard turn and was closer to what I was expecting if not from the beginning, then at least for more than half of the game instead of less than 25%. Without giving much away, the game did away with the traditional enemies with guns and instead threw hovering low-resolution ghost-like creatures at you which may or may not have been conjured into your mind from an outside entity. Now, it may seem rather silly and very American to shoot a ghost with a high-powered state-of-the-art combat shotgun or a submachine gun, but when it works in your mind, it works in real life. Plus the creatures were doing real-world damage to my person, and thankfully they only took a hit or two before they died/disappeared. The downside to fighting noncorporeal enemies was that ammo was not being dropped and became a lot harder to come by, and I even swapped weapons out a few times as I had run out of ammo for one type of gun but found the corpse of an enemy with a different weapon with different ammo. So what was originally a shooter, was quickly becoming a shooter with survival-horror elements
I wish that I had more to say about F.E.A.R. in terms of it being more than a decent first-person shooter with the occasional horror elements, a paranormal storyline, and great enemy AI, but that is really the gist of it. It was a decent game, it just was not the game I was hoping it to be. While I have the two expansions, Extraction Point, and Perseus Mandate, as well as the sequel, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, I am unsure at the moment if I will continue with the series. It might all just depend on how long the expansions are and the sequel, and if there are more horror elements, or if those end up going out the window for just a straight action-shooter with a character who is able to slow down time.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
We're Screaming Without Sound
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