F.E.A.R. me

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

Published by Vivendi

Review by Greg Cutcher

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Or so F.E.A.R. will want you to believe.

Within the game, you will be playing the new recruit of F.E.A.R. Unfortunately, just after joining, the squad you are in relays a video-feed of a cannibalistic psychopath, Paxton Fettel, eating someone while soldiers stand about to guard him. After seeing the footage, the F.E.A.R. Squad decides to send out some members to take down Paxton. After deciding to go ahead, the head of your squad decides you are fit to go because you are quick, able and above all else, agile beyond any measure.

Awesome, so now you have your in. Go forward with your gun-in-hand and read your one-page mission brief as the game loads. As the game actually begins, you find yourself in the heat of action, sorta. You shoot your way through some areas until you discover some burnt skeletons and a nasty girl with long hair covering her face and fire dancing about her. She crispifies some more solders and tosses you out of a window.

As you play more, you find that there is a corporate cover up for military testing, another group that wants to interfere and random 'scary' bits. Some of these 'scary' bits include random people getting burnt to cinders or you winding up in a random pool of blood and seeing a skeleton emerge. You will eventually run into robots and the like, but they are not scary beyond the fact they can kill you in a blink of an eye. Sometimes you can listen to phone messages on random phones to get some more story insight, but it's an over-used mechanic.

Okay, so I gave you a smidgen of insight into the game, but what gameplay makes this game potentially appealing? You can slow down time . . . Wait, you are just lightning-quick. By holding down Ctrl (or whatever key you set it to), a small blue bar will start draining while you speed up. Whatever is about you slows down dramatically, however, you slow down a fair bit as well With this ability, you can crouch, improve your aim with a keystroke and wait for the enemy and plug him with bullets. Unfortunately, F.E.A.R. Starts off by training you that this ability is good for running away. So you have the ability to slow down time, so-to-speak, wonderful.

Next on our list is what the FPS bits that make F.E.A.R. its own. You can either have the ability to run and fast-walk like there is no tomorrow, save that your aim will be like the Imperial Guard out of Star Wars, pathetic. With one keystroke, you can limit your running to a walk and your walk to a stagger, but this improves your aim. After you kill soldiers, you can go near them to steal ammo and weapons. Seriously, if this is sounding like mechanics from other FPS games, you can skip this paragraph now.

I'll hand it to Monolith Games however for the AI. Within F.E.A.R., the enemies act as individual characters that interact with one-another against you. If one spots you, they'll be quick to alert the others. If you hide, they'll shot to one-another, devising ways to either flush you out or to kill you where you are at, and do it.

Scripted events really bothered me in this game. At one point I'm playing, then I find my character getting thrown around by the evil girl, or someone knocking me out from behind. What really seemed irritating was that you could see at points some 'distortion' in reality and you have no choice but to walk into them. Well, you have a choice, but the other option is to turn back and face empty areas that you've cleared. Not fun. Other scripted events have random things like a kid running through a dark cavern and vanishes to a ghost walking away from you and eventually exploding into ash.

There is a huge section of gore in this game. With gore toggled on, you can see blood and mayhem caused by you or the girl or anyone else for that matter.

Lastly, I'll kick the can with physics. With the game engine, many things can be moved about/knocked over/what have you. However, unlike some games now, you cannot interact with 90% of the things about you besides knocking them around. I wish there was more you could do with the environments, but not much you can do. However, it's always fun to see things flying about with your grenades or a spray of bullets.

Concluding for this simple review, I find F.E.A.R. to be adequate. It will not scare the bejeebers out of you unless you really are revved up for a scare. However, the game play offers a little bit of entertainment, but not enough. Scare factor is quite meager, unless are scared of random pools of blood and skeletons. If you get F.E.A.R., play for the AI, the gore and the semi-decent storyline.