I enjoyed half of a demo of this game at E3 before Adam Sessler's entourage showed up and our scheduled appointment got...shortened. I guess he's a big star or something. Anyway, the demo clips we saw were impressive and spooky and this game is being billed as if it's the most horrifying gaming experience of all time. After all that, I'd expect it to be at least a little scary. After playing it, though, I've decided they should have named it “H.Y.P.E.”
F.E.A.R. is “First Encounter Assault Recon” It's a title that makes me think someone, somewhere lost a bet. If they'd stretched any farther to come up with something that “fear” would be an acronym for, they'd have sprained something. Anyway, it's the name of an elite special ops team whose purpose is to deal with paranormal military situations. Yeah, another one.
Anyway, enough already about the stupid title. Let's look at the game, shall we? Our stoic, yet eternally nameless, hero is the newest member of the F.E.A.R. team and is chosen as point man when the excrement hits the psychic fan at a secret government research facility.(Yeah, another one of those, too.) “Point man” in the world of F.E.A.R. apparently means “the guy who does all the work before anyone else shows up”. Not exactly in keeping with reality, but it's all good.
Apparently this “secret government research” is about psychic powers. The intent is to create a psychic commander and a battalion of psychic soldiers who he can control telepathically. Things go horribly awry, as they are wont to do, and the psychic soldiers start shooting people and the commander starts eating the dead and doing bloody-faced poses for the camera. Um. Yeah. The brass sent in a recon team first and they...well, let's just say it got messy. Now, of course, only F.E.A.R. can help.
I guess I should mention that F.E.A.R. is a first person shooter. As such it is pretty standard fare. You have an array of weapons at your disposal and you traipse through warehouses, factories, office buildings and secret government research facilities mowing down everything that moves. You'll also have a few kung-fu kick tricks up your sleeve, but they'll rarely be useful. They are awkward to use and most enemies start peppering you with bullets long before you get close enough anyway.
Weapons are one thing the game does fairly well. There's the standard pistol, two types of machine guns and the ever-present combat shotgun. The two machine guns are the bread and butter of your arsenal as the enemies are dropping them constantly to reload you. Aren't they thoughtful?
The only annoying thing about this is when the enemies you encounter suddenly switch from one type of machine gun to the other. You'll have too much ammo to justify throwing down your current weapon. When you finally run out and switch to the other machine gun, you'll find yourself backtracking through a level gathering up the ammo from the weapons you'd left behind.
The game also provides some special purpose weapons and those are the real standouts. F.E.A.R.'s equivalent of a rail gun is a Type 7 Particle Weapon. For the most part, it's a one-hit, one-kill weapon and leaves nothing of the target but a scorched skeleton. Once I got my hands on one, I was hooked. It's the tool of choice for quick kills and it's the closest thing there is to a sniper rifle.
Also of note is the 10mm HV Penetrator. This is a high velocity nail gun that results in some of the most comical death poses ever seen in video games. The weapon turns enemies into pincushions of agony and the killing shot will literally pin them to the wall or floor. It's a brutal and deadly-accurate weapon and definitely one of my favorites.
The game does not leave boxes of ammunition lying around, thankfully doing away with a staple of the genre. Keeping a weapon when it is out of ammo is pointless as you won't find more ammo until you find another of the same type of gun anyway. You can carry three weapons at a time (four, technically, if you choose to dual wield pistols) and a boatload of ammo for each weapon. You'll also carry a handful of grenades, proximity mines and other explosives to round out your mobile arsenal.
This is yet another game to implement bullet time, but it's probably the most uninspired use of the gimmick I've ever seen. It slows you down almost as much as it does everyone else, making it pretty much useless except when you need to dash out from cover, pop off a few shots at the enemy and get back to safety before they can fill you with holes.
F.E.A.R. throws maybe a dozen distinct types of enemies at you. Most of them are nothing more than cannon fodder. Among the few notable exceptions are: a guy with heavy armor who's essentially hard-to-kill cannon fodder, rocket-launching robots on legs, flying bug-zappers from hell and invisible ninjas on crack. The ninjas easily pose the most challenge among the lot of them and that's only because they're so ridiculously fast...and invisible. These freaks will come at you out of nowhere and you'll have to be quick on your bullet time button if you don't want to take some serious damage.
The game's much-ballyhooed enemy AI cheats like you wouldn't believe. I'm talking about shooting through walls, seeing the un-seeable, and lobbing grenades with pinpoint accuracy three hundred yards away and around corners. There's no such thing as stealth in F.E.A.R. Enemies will spot you as soon as they have line of sight, regardless of visibility. You can be crouched in pitch black shadows while they're standing in the center of a brightly lit room. It doesn't matter. When you hear one of them shout that he's seen you, there's probably a grenade already on its way. Once you learn how the AI cheats, though, you'll quickly learn how to cheat it back and the game will become a series of firefights that I'd call “pretty good.”
Occasionally, the hero will have a little psychic visitation from beyond, where we learn about who the bad guy is and why he's bad. Those interludes really feel tacked on, or perhaps it's the other way around and the run-of-the-mill gameplay was tacked on to someone's spook story.
Overall, there's nothing really new in this game. The story is just a rehash of Hollywood scare flicks, but not anywhere near as scary. The enemies are generic and fairly predictable. The weapons are cool and make for some good firefights, but that's about all the game has going for it. If you love first-person shooters, this is a decent one to play, but don't buy into the hype that it's the scariest game ever.
I'm a thirty-something computer programmer. I live in Delaware, but I grew up in Arkansas in a tiny town of 2500. We didn't have video arcades. Heck, it was nearly an hour's drive to anything as sophisticated as a Wal*Mart. Needless to say, my exposure to video games as a child was somewhat limited.
In the mid 80's, I cut my teeth on a used Atari 2600 bought at a flea market and a handful of games like Space Invaders and Pac Man. I was hooked in a blink. In the decades since, I've become a big fan of many genres of games. From first-person shooters to role-playing to strategy and everything in between. The only games that categorically don't interest me are sports games.
The easiest way for a game to win me over is to have a gripping story. I'll forgive a lot in a game that grabs me and keeps me interested. The inverse is true, too. If a game does not have a killer story, its gameplay had better be pretty darn compelling to make up for it. That doesn't happen very often
