F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon

（Played on Steam Deck. About 8 hours to see credits roll on Easy. Again, the game was obviously designed for mouse and keyboard while yours truly was the stubborn ass trying to play with a controller like setting.）

The goofily titled F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon was among the last of its kind when it came out in 2005. So much so that not even its sequels followed its footstep. The sea change brought in by things like Gears of War and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare made sure of that.

Before Trepang 2 came out, I tried its demo and found its combat encounters bit too long-winded. So, when I saw the Deck’s “Playable” tag on F.E.A.R, I thought why pay for a cheaper “knockoff” when I can play the real one that I bought more than a decade ago. With the mid-30s sneaking upon me, the Xbox 360/PS3 generation started to feel like a time when more was lost and less was gain to yours truly. Playing F.E.A.R 2 right after the first one certainly added to that sentiment. Well, I am not sure I would continue with the 2009 sequel, but here are my thoughts on the pretty good first one.

A Carpenter’s tool shed

Monolith’ current state as Warner’s licensed “Assassin’s Creed clone” (with their patented Nemesis System) maker is actually not too far from the studio’s days as a first-person shooter developer. Their shooters always had at least one foot in imitating one form of pop culture or another. Shogo being about mecha anime, No One Lives Forever being about spy fiction. With F.E,A.R, it’s blend of Asian action and horror cinema.

Or so it seemed. Personally, I think John Carpenter’s endorsement was given because he truly felt faltered by this game’s imitation of his filmography. On top of a reasonable paycheck, of course. F.E.A.R is the hybrid of Carpenter action and Carpenter horror yet not played for laughs like Big Trouble in Little China. It’s Prince of Darkness if the grad-students going into that church with heavy weapons or Snake Pliskin escaping from New York and the city’s ghostly threats.

The titular First Encounter Assault Recon was a unit created for combating supernatural threats. In 2025, they will be deployed to combat a unit of clones controlled by a homicidal psychic. Somehow, the unit’s silent Point Man becomes sole survivor after one FUBAR situation after another. And if you have not played this game but read that old Carpenter interview I linked above, do consider the comparison he made to Metal Gear Solid a minor spoiler.

Quarter-life

Being a first-person game published by Sierra after 1998, F.E.A.R is obviously a Half-life like action-adventure game. The downside of imitating Half-life to a t is the game’s cliffhanging ending, which yours truly consider a major reason why the series had its downward trajectory after a rather stunning debut in 2005. It could have seen more installments about its titular unit’s various missions. Instead, it got stuck with the horror monster Alma. Shame.

Fortunately, the game’s imitating Half-life did mostly contribute to its merits. Though to be fair, the game does not even allow player to pick up and throw around objects the way 1998’s first Half-life does. The best one can do is to blow them up with explosives or whack them around with melee. The bit mostly like Half-life is something that can be called path-finding, as one door or corridor is closed by a scripted event, player has to look around and find a window or air-duct to continue.

But of course, combat is where F.E.A.R shines, or else the aforementioned 2023 release would not model its battle after this old game. With some corporate asshats still held the trademark over Bullet Time back then, this 2005 title named its time-slowing thing on juice Focus and it’s almost essential in killing anything in the game. The most basic enemy grunt is still kitted out with body armor that takes several shots to kill and they move fast unless player stays Focused.

Aesthetics adds to the satisfaction one gets out of the combat as well. The game, being a 2005 polygonal extravaganza, certainly does the physics of stuff flying around well. Dust might be annoying but one can take it as incentive to move around rather than stop and pop. After fights, the bullet-holes on the wall somehow satisfy my hunger for “fucking shit up” more than the bloody bodies on the ground.

Boy, do I miss the ability to lean around corner in the mid-aughts FPS. That is corner checking, yet not a cheat since enemies move reasonably in the arenas. Had this feature been in the game’s 2009 sequel, it would be piss easy with that game’s dumb enemy AI.

And it’s truly a shame Monolith just cannot do ending well. The game’s epilogue would have player shoot dumb ghosts rush in rather than the more fun to fight enemies. Oh well, at least it’s fun, if a little repetitive, before that.

Deck work

It seems like I cannot play a Monolith FPS without spending time on key-binding. Shogo Mobile Armor Division, the only other one I played through, has a bizarre layout compared to the standard brought in by Quake 2 and Half-life of its days. While Monolith had pretty much laid into that standard by 2005, playing F.E.A.R. on Steam Deck still takes some key binding for it to feel comfortable to me.

The community layout for the left track-pad is fine, still I prefer the quick-save on a solid button I can push. I am also in the game for leaning around the corners so why not bind Q and E to the D-pad.

Deck is pretty much for playing those old “no chance in hell would it be ported to Switch” polygonal extravaganzas. Some just take more work to play than others. Especially the older ones without standard controller get-up before the Xbox 360 days, and F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon somehow managed.

Verdict

“Monolith made a better first-person action game than id Software” would be laughed off with a “Yeah, yeah, after the world ends, maybe” in the late 1990s. Then it’s exactly what happened when 2004’s Doom 3 is compared to 2005’s F.E.A.R. And the world did end for the shooters like them shortly after, with Gears of War firmly ushered in the over-shoulder domination even beyond its own genre in 2006 and Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare “dumbed down” the so-called tactical shooters in 2007. 2009’s F.E.A.R 2 Project Origin being more of a cod clone is somewhat painful to see here in the beginning of 2024. Oh well, it’s not like this part of the history for this lousy media form cannot be experienced, apart for the Multiplayer for it was shut down even back when I made the purchase in 2013.