F.E.A.R. 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.
