As I have said before and as I will say time and time again. The FPS genre is old and tired, it is constantly being filled with IP's that are carbon copies of another game or are sequels with 1 or 2 new features. It is rare to come across a game that does something new or at least tries especially in the genre of First Person Shooters. There are games that have defined the FPS genre and rightly so, with titles such as Halo and Half-Life being names that should be recognised as contributors to the FPS scene, however it has been a while since a FPS truly defined what it means to be an FPS.
Monolith Studios, known for their amazing action horror game Condemned, have brought a new card to the table in the form of F.E.A.R. F.E.A.R stands for First Encounter Assault Recon, in F.E.A.R you play as a character known only as Point man and you are FEAR's newest recruit. Your team has been sent in to Armacham Technology to take down a high priority individual known as Paxton Fettel. Fettel is a telepath and has taken control of a clone army. Very little is given away about the story for the majority of the game and when it does finally does begin to all fall into place in the final couple of missions it is a very good one. You learn of a little girl named Alma who is some sort of psychic and was used in experimentation for something named 'Project Origin'. During the process she somehow became pregnant and gave birth to two children. One of them is Fettel. The crux of the games story is Alma, it is about her past and her present, who she is and what she is capable of doing.
I wont go into any more detail on the story as it is one you should experience yourself. The game plays as you would expect a FPS to play. You point at things and you shoot them. However F.E.A.R is hard, it is perhaps one of the hardest FPS's I have ever played due to the fact that it challenges you. I started the game on normal but quickly had to switch to easy and eve then was a tough one to beat. Gunfights are very fast paced, the fasted I have ever seen. This is why you are given a mechanism to slow down time, so you can line up your shots and take down the enemy with ease, however this feature is very limited and takes a large amount of time to recharge, meaning you cant rely on it. You have to tune your reflexes to see enemies and snap to them before they can do it to you. It is made even harder by enemies having a fairly intelligent AI, the main priority of course is to kill you but when they are taking damage they do their best to flee into cover, making them a worthy foe. You also have a health bar, those of you born post 1999 wouldn’t know what one of these are so let me fill you in. Its a bar or counter that decreases when you take damage and can only be restored with health kits. No hiding behind walls rubbing your bruises for a few seconds then run back out onto the battlefield like Rambo, F.E.A.R requires thinking, tactics and a sense of your surroundings. Guns vary from pistols to SMG's to shotguns, machine guns, rockets and even energy weapons that fire electricity. F.E.A.R does not have many weapons and it doesn’t need many weapons, it feels big enough as it is. This was also one gripe with the game I have heard over and over again about the lack of variety in enemies and the lack of different weapons. Firstly the soldiers are all the same because they are CLONES, clones look the same, not different. The the guns point is valid I suppose but F.E.A.R gives you that sense of being good enough to not need millions of weapons to take down the same enemies over and over again.
The game looks old, yeah it was made in 2005 but it looks older than 2005. The graphics are poor, the textures are all the same and there is a lot of grey meaning little variety in what your looking at. Plus levels feel copy and pasted from each other and very bland but this works. It works because of where the game is set, an office complex and industrial site. How often do you see an office complex with 9 or 10 different layouts on one floor, how often do you see industrial sites with neon lights and brightly coloured walls. This is perhaps one of the only times that a game could get away with being as lazy as the level designers were, or perhaps they intended the levels to be like that. The lighting is atrocious in F.E.A.R, it may have been to do with it being a pain in the arse to run on my laptop but there were no transitions in light. It was either very bright or so dark you couldn’t see, the torch didn’t help with that as it only have a lifespan of about 20 seconds before having to charge for another 10. This, no matter how incredibly annoying added to the atmosphere that the game attempts to build around you. Little shock scares come out at you every now and again and when its pitch black and you have a limited light supply it puts you a bit on edge. However once you learn that these shocks pose no threat to you until the last two chapters of the game you begin to see them less as threats and more of preparation for more fighting.
The sound is good too, nice musical cues that are never too loud or quiet and great ambience when playing with headphones. The only complaint I can find with audio is that sometimes the voices are muffled or a bit quiet due to the action that is taking place on screen.
F.E.A.R isn’t a long game, I completed it in 7 hours with about 30 odd deaths and having to look up a walk through for one part near the end. F.E.A.R is a great FPS game and one that in a very long time that I can say defines the FPS genre. Anybody who doesn’t like horror games should not be put off as the shocks in this game are merely blood soaked or light flickering in shock level. However if your looking for something with wide open environments, a wide assortment of guns and a long campaign then look elsewhere. F.E.A.R is relatively cheap too with it costing about £7 with both expansion packs on Steam however it requires some fairly hefty machinery to run it for a game that was made in 05. F.E.A.R is by no means perfect as I have stated but most of these problems are visual more than game play threatening and once you get used to the visuals they become easy to live with. F.E.A.R is a game that will hopefully live in FPS stardom for years to come.
F.E.A.R – 9/10
+Great Shooting Mechanics
+Unadulterated Fun
-Shows It's Age
