The original F.E.A.R taught me to never judge a book by its cover. With a extremely lazy approach to making a game with few weapons, enemies or a sense of direction in story F.E.A.R ended up being one of my favourite FPS titles in recent years. With that stunning conclusion at the end of F.E.A.R and that rather large revelation about you, Paxton Fettel and Alma; I couldn’t wait to see what F.E.A.R 2 had to offer.
The game starts around about 30 minutes before the end of F.E.A.R, meaning that Alma has not yet destroyed the city. You play as Michael Becket, a Delta force squad member sent in to take a woman named Genevieve Aristide into protective custody before Alma can destroy the city. However things go tits up and you lose Aristide and Alma destroys the city. For the rest of the game you hunt down Aristide as well as finding out a lot more about the mysterious 'Project Origin' initiative. So on a whole, the games story is not much different from the original games one. Hunt someone down for the majority of the game and then find out something majorly game changing at the end. The game changer in F.E.A.R 2 is that Becket has a telestectic signature. This signature coupled with a device linked to Project Origin could kill Alma and return the world to a state of peace again.
First and foremost I am extremely pissed off with Monolith because of what they did to the F.E.A.R name in this sequel. It does not look like F.E.A.R, it does not play like F.E.A.R. Yes its still an FPS but the gameplay is much slower compared to F.E.A.R's fast frantic gunfights and heavy use of the slow-mo function. In F.E.A.R 2 there is barely any need for slow-mo as the game is already moving in it. Enemies rarely come out of cover and when they do they don’t necessarily shoot you. The “Intelligent” AI has obviously been dumped along with all sense of challenge. You can now only carry 3 medpacks however you’ll never need to use them because the game is one of the easiest FPS's I have ever played and there are more bullet vests laying around than actual enemies making you near invincible. I think I died twice in F.E.A.R 2 and that was because of general cocking up by me, not by me being given an actual challenge by the game. The flashlight is now infinite too removing all sense of fear of dark areas, not to mention the game is a hell of a lot brighter than the original.
However it is not all bad, the gunplay is much better in F.E.A.R 2. Who knew Iron sights would be a blessing. Although I assume the iron sights is what has slowed the combat down. And you rarley need them as the guns hipfire mechanic is more than accurate enough for most of the guns. Guns are of the same assortment as last time more or less. SMG, Pistol, Machine Gun, Sniper etc. all return for the sequel and all of them improved from the last time around. My favourite gun in the original was the machine gun and that has been swapped to the SMG in F.E.A.R 2. The SMG is one of the first weapons you get and it will probably last you most of the game with its insane power and huge ammo capacity. The slo-mo drains a lot faster but takes the same amount of time to recharge but that’s not a bad thing as you never need the bloody thing and apparently sprinting has been made better. I never knew you could sprint in F.E.A.R 1 but according to several sources sprinting is improved, even if it does only last 3 fucking seconds.
Repetitiveness was what F.E.A.R was criticised heavily for. Its lack of enemy variation and copy&paste level design was hated among critics and players alike. However it worked, it worked because of the type of environments that you were in. Now when a sequel comes along I play a game of how many areas have been copied from the original game. Now I can happily say that F.E.A.R 2 has very few areas copy and pasted, this may be due to none of the levels directly being set in a warehouse or office complex but... Where levels have been copied and pasted they have been put in the wrong places which was absolutely painful to look at. There is a mission set in a school and as I was walking through it suddenly changed into an office complex with an elevator for the students too. Now excuse me for being harsh Monolith but what the actual fuck? I have no idea what the schools you went to looked like and it may even be an American thing to have elevators in schools but I personally have never ever seen a lift in a school for the kids. And especially never seen a school that looks like the office at the start of The Matrix. It is poor level design and stupid decision making at its finest here people, but hopefully that wont get you down too much. With an overly long hospital section that takes up nearly half the game and with a ridiculous length of only about 4 hours F.E.A.R 2 was in shambles for level design and innovation. Especially with that 12GB storage space tag.
F.E.A.R looked awful, yes it was made in 2005 but it looked awful. Thankfully F.E.A.R 2 fixes this, mostly. It does look better, it looks fitting for the time it was made in however now that it is 2012 it is showing its age, but it still looks better than Call of Duty. Everything is much beefier than it was in F.E.A.R, everything felt anorexic in the first game. Guns were skinny and enemies didn’t look like the force to be feared that they were. Now enemies look much bigger in size, towering over Becket in many circumstances and guns look and feel a lot more powerful and big. Sound has been much improved too but yet again its the damn voices on the chat that are struggling to be heard at times. And going back to the enemies. Why oh why oh why Monolith did you decide it would be a good idea to make the clones have different voices? Clones are the same as each other in every single way! Why do they have individual voices? Also there is a new security force to deal with that aren’t clones but look more like clones than the clones do. Plus there is a hell of a lot more of them than the clones, everything is off kilter in F.E.A.R 2 and sometimes its hard to overlook the annoying little problems.
F.E.A.R 2 is still a great FPS. But with all the problems from the first remaining (be it only a few) plus the masses of new problems make F.E.A.R 2 irritating to play. It does suffer from middle child syndrome, with it having no real beginning as it assumes you already know the situation and no real end so it leaves it open to be concluded in F.E.A.R 3. However the ending, even though it is good for a cliffhanger still pissed me off when it came around. A huge shock then just bam credits felt a bit, anticlimactic. F.E.A.R 2 is for fans of the original only, and even that’s a bit of a push considering how much you liked the originals odd mechanics. They have made it more accessible but in doing so they have made a game that only fans will understand and enjoy due to its complicated story arc and odd game mechanics.
F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin – 6/10
+Good Gameplay
-It's Just Not .F.E.A.R
