F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. (hereafter referred to as FEAR) is the second franchise-creating first-person shooter developed by Monolith that took me longer to complete than it should have due to technical issues. Just like it was years before I finished No One Lives Forever, FEAR came out late in 2005 but I just beat it recently, after encountering numerous glitches and an issue with getting the game to reinstall. It didn't really sully my experience though, as once I started really playing it I ended up enjoying it quite a lot.

FEAR's central, fairly risky idea is a mix of high intensity, visceral combat and moments of creepy, psychological horror. It's a balance that could easily be screwed up, but they handle it pretty well. Just when you get tired of the waves and waves of enemies, they might throw in some unnerving atmospheric stuff or an appearance by the little girl the story revolves around. At the time little girls in horror entertainment were becoming a cliché, but it works.

The majority of the game though is fighting a ton of clone soldiers, and it's generally fun, with the levels designed in a way to allow their AI to move around and try to flank you instead of just staying in one place until you shoot them. They can be pretty tough, especially when they introduce some of the tougher enemies later on, but you have a lot of help from the ability to slow time, lots of equipment and health boosts littered everywhere, and getting to carry around up to 10 health packs anywhere you go. As it is the thing to do now, you can only carry three weapons at once. I don't feel like they handled this limit as well as other games, because I carried the same two around almost the entire time since they were usually a good combination, and I basically didn't use any automatic weapons for 80% of the game. The normal soldiers do get boring to fight once in a while, but there are some others to keep it fresh. I was disappointed by the lack of variety, with them going out of their way to prevent you from ever having allies during a fight and little deviation from the formula, but the formula was pretty good.

The graphics are already not nearly as impressive as they were when the game was first released, but in context it's pretty nice looking and the effects actually affect gameplay, with smoke constantly obscuring either your or the enemy's line of sight. The voice acting is decent, the sound effects help pull you into every skirmish, and the music and ambient noises really help set the dark mood they're going for. I really like it when shooters avoid leaving the first-person point of view and still effectively convey the story, because it's a presentation style unique to video games that can be really effective when done right. It's a little contrived when you stumble upon laptops and voice mails that slowly enlighten the story details in a very planned, progressive order, but it doesn't hurt believability too much and is plenty entertaining. The plot builds in the standard way and culminates with the standard twist, but it's the standard for a reason. I really liked the epilogue, and since the real sequel disregards the events of the expansions developed by another company, I'll probably just wait until it comes out later this year to see what happens next.