F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

FEAR 2 is an easier game than the original, and generally stuck out from the crowd less when it was released for the same reasons. FEAR was an early post-Half-Life 2 shooter that was notable for two reasons; its horror atmosphere, and the complex AI of the soldiers you fought, who seemed incredibly smart at the time, and worked together to flush you out and flank you. FEAR 2 maintains the creepy mood of its predecessor, but the combat seems much more straightforward, and designed to keep you constantly running and gunning rather than approaching every situation carefully. Weapons, ammo, health kits, and body armor are constantly being thrown at you, and the enemies seem less concerned with flanking you than they used to be. It's possible I'm just remembering them being a lot smarter than they really were, but I think it was a conscious choice to make the game a bit easier for casual players to handle. I'm no shooter expert but I almost never even had to use the ability to slow down time you gain that was so heavily featured in the first game, and I rarely died at all.

I've never thought extreme challenge was a particular asset in most games though, and I don't think I really liked or disliked the combat any more than I did in the first game. It's just a slightly different focus, and that's fine, especially when the game's setting is enough to keep you interested while the game lasts. The FEAR series isn't exactly what I'd call scary, because the plot is just sort of science fiction supernatural horror gibberish, and there's not much that's inherently terrifying about its premise. It's hard to be scared when you're constantly expecting weird, freaky stuff to happen, and the game has a couple effective jump scares, but they're few and far between. It's more what I'd call a spooky sort of atmosphere, one that's entertaining in the way it sets up horrific little scenarios for you to walk through. There's something killing people in this world besides just you, and it's almost amusing to come across the huge puddles and streaks of blood everywhere and try to imagine how it all got there.

The game bounces you back and forth between letting you explore these areas, uncovering packets of text that develop the back story and explain the characters a bit, and just throwing tons of enemies at you. There's a surprisingly good variety of enemies for a game known to be all about fighting endless hordes of clone soldiers. The different types of soldiers are immediately recognizable and have their own abilities to worry about, and the game will occasionally change up the pace by introducing heavy mechs or a couple kinds of more horror-themed enemies which require their own tactics. There's a pretty good variety of weapons as well, many of which are standard machine guns or shotguns, but the more exotic stuff is usually interesting. Once in a while you also get to pilot a mech yourself, which is pretty simple but fun for the few minutes where you're just blasting everything in sight with swarms of missiles.

It's something you miss when you don't play the previous game for a few years, but FEAR 2 is a nice step up in visual quality from its predecessor. That's sort of obvious when it came out so much later, but I still thought it was a nice looking game, both from a technical and design perspective. FEAR drew complaints for its environments being fairly dull, consisting mostly of similar warehouses and office buildings. Thanks in part to the story of the second game beginning with the nuke that goes off at the end of the first one, there's more of an opportunity for unique and memorable locations. You explore familiar areas like city streets and a hospital, but they've been turned upside down by the violence that's been happening, and there are a few other kinds of areas. I liked in the first game that the buildings you shot your way through seemed like real buildings, but FEAR 2 has a better balance between that and stuff that's still cool to look at. My favorite location was probably the elementary school, which definitely makes nice use of the juxtaposition between what it was before and what has happened to it. It also features heavily into the plot, which is generally standard horror fare, though it is pretty remarkable what pains the writers went through to make the corporation behind everything seem as evil as possible.

The game is fun while it lasts, which ends up being the length of a typical modern shooter. I was a bit confused at first about the difference between missions and "intervals", which are the only markings of story progress that you actually see while playing the game. The plot ends sort of abruptly, but it does so in a crazy enough way that it felt like a decent conclusion to a pretty wacky ride. When I bought the game on Steam the Reborn add-on was included, which I'm glad for, because I can't imagine it's length makes it worth whatever they were originally charging. It does give you another opportunity to check out all the enemies and weapons again, and tells a briefly interesting story involving an antagonist from the first game, but it's pretty spare otherwise and barely lasts an hour. It felt like a bonus mission more than a fully fleshed out add-on like other games have seen. Overall though, I had enough fun with the package for it to be worth it.

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.