F.E.A.R. playthrough

I just finished playing through F.E.A.R. , no not FEAR 2, the original F.E.A.R. Fear 2's release last week made me realize I never finished the first FEAR. I assume a lot of people probably did not finish the first FEAR. Any time, anyone brings up FEAR they will always assuredly mention the fact that there are an endless amounts of similar looking office spaces  throughout the game. This is true, the first half of the game alternates continuously between office spaces and rooms made of concrete, like sewers and maintenance rooms. This repetitiveness probably bored many people before the half-way point of the game.

Thankfully if you can slug it through the first half your treated to some much needed variety in the later stages, while it sounds like FEAR 2 does a much better job at mixing it up throughout the game, FEAR's later half is not too shabby. You get to explore medical offices (trust me, even the smallest change of a "medical" office helps), an abandoned apartment building, some back alleys and the good old FPS main-stay, the warehouse.

In these semi-repetitive environments you get to experience FEAR's main draw, the gunfights. FEAR's gunfights are really really good and still stand-up 3 1/2 years later. The enemy AI is smart at taking cover and working together to flank you, a lot of games claim their AI does this, but FEAR's AI does it and does it well. There were numerous times throughout the game that the AI did something that surprised me, which is good because throughout most of the game you are fighting the same replica soldiers over and over again.

FEAR is a bit lacking in the enemy variety. You have you standard replica soldier, who gets upgraded with heavier amour 3 times throughout the game. You have the Armtech soldiers, who are basically the same as the replica soldiers. You have the Heavy Soldier, with big shoulder pads to block your shots, equipped with a powerful weapon. You have the man-sized mechs, who can soak up a lot of damage and fire missiles at you. You have an enemy I believe is called the Watcher, they are fast, cloaked,  stick to walls and have a strong melee attack. Finally you have the ghosts, who show up mostly at the end of the game, they just fly at you and are easily killed.

The thing is that 90% of the time your fighting the same Replica Soldiers, the Heavy's show up now and again, the Mech's only show up a handful of times. The Watchers are probably the coolest looking enemy in the game, but they only show up twice. Maybe this is a good thing though, since any time anything but the replica soldiers showed up I would loose a lot of health, that and the Replica soldiers are the most fun to fight.

Not only are they fun to fight because they are smarter than your average AI grunt, you also get to employ the game's bullet-time mechanic. There are a lot of games that have tried to pull bullet-time off, but I think FEAR is one of the few that get it right. I think Max Payne 2 does it better, but FEAR's bullet time is good for the same reason. Both games employ a lot of particle effects, bullet hits, blood and ragdolls. I really never got sick of dropping into bullet time, turning a corner and blasting three guys in the face with my shotgun before they had the chance to pull the trigger. Lots of nice touches, like when you kill a guy who is firing at you, he continues to spray the room as he dies in glorious slow-motion death.

I originally heard FEAR described as "John Woo meets The Ring", I would probably append that to be "John Woo meets the matrix, meets The Ring, meets Akira". The John Woo influence is obvious with dual-wielded pistols, gun-ballet and martial art kicks. Just as obvious is the the game's connection to anime and Japanese horror. Throughout the game you encounter Alma, a psychic creepy little girl with dreams of revenge. This manifests itself in psychic illusions throughout the game, basically this means creepy shit suddenly happens, then disappears. Thing is, its not really that scary, as cool as some of the sequences are, like one in which the ceiling turns into a river of blood, they are not really scary. Especially in the jump-scare kind of way, since the game always gives you an audio cue of a creepy static sound just before anything happens. These sequences are fun to watch, and don't take away anything from the game, but they really are not scary. Monolith's own Condemned series can be much creepier and scarier. FEAR's story brings up a lot of questions and it really doesn't bother answering any of them till the end.

Overall I think FEAR is a solid game, that is still worth a play through if you have about 7 hours to spare. I found the gunfights fun until the end and while the game isn't scary it is well put together and entertaining. I wasn't really looking forward to FEAR 2 much a couple weeks ago, but after this play through of the original game I really want to see where this goes.