I recently played FEAR, a First Person shooter, published by Sierra(who published, among other things, Half life and it's expansion packs) and developed by monolith(who developed such titles as Aliens versus Predator 2 and No One Lives Forever). It's had two expansion packs so far, Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate(which has recently been released). I know this game has been out for a few years, but it's only recently my PC was powerful enough to play it and all three games have been conveniently packaged into one box for the price of $40. That and I'd heard good things about it, like "Game of the year" and such.
FEAR is actually an acroynem for First Encounter Assault Recon and according to the opening titles and Manuel, is a top secret special forces unit formed within the US Army in 1992 to combat things that don't fall into the normal bounds of threats to the American People AKA the paranormal. So far so good, and while the idea of a secret government unit/agency has been used a lot over the past few years(such as The X-files, Torchwood, Clive Barker's Jericho, Hellboy, etc), I'm usually willing to give it a try despite that.
The plot goes as such: Your requisite giant, evil corporation(who probably compete with Umbrella Corp. for defense contracts) has created an army of super soldier clones who are psychically controlled by a commander named Fettle, who has spent a while in a padded cell before being let out by a creepy little ghost girl who will figure into the rest of it somehow. They then go on to start killing all the corporate goons for some reason and Fettle starts drinking the blood of certain people(it's said there's a reason but you never find out why).
In response, the Aforementioned special forces unit which, as far as I can tell, consists of 5 people total, including yourself(8 if you count the three in Perseus mandate), are sent in to a water treatment plant to stop the crazy clone action.
However, none of the fear personnel are much help, as the only other fighter disappears early in the game and his fate is never really explained. Which leaves you, a nameless, faceless, mute guy who has the ability to invoke superfast reflexes, which slows down time in a Matrix/Max Payne-ish "Bullet Time Manner". The goal, given at the beginning, with a few side quests, is to kill Fettle, which will make his 1000 or so clones go limp. Of course, knowing that, it's not exactly a spoiler to say that you will not get to do this till near the end of the game, and you will have to kill every single clone you come across in order to achieve this goal. The plot meanders around somewhat, being both thin and labiythine, with many unanswered questions, even after Extraction Point(which is really more of the same, but more intense) By the time I got to Perseus Mandate, I just didn't care anymore and stopped playing.
Normally, the following words make me wary, due to the incredible cliche-ness of them: "Clone", "super soldier", "Psychic", so when I find out that I'm fighting an army of "Psychic cloned super soldiers", My eyes started to roll heavily, but that was relieved somewhat by one of the characters saying "Psychic clones? No wonder nobody takes us seriously!" And I'll give it props for at least admitting that bad guys tend to be clones anyway, but there's not really any need due to the fact all of the enemies wear full body armor. Unfortunately, that's not enough to save the concept. Red Alert 2 pulled off the psychic clone thing rather well, but then again, EA was smart enough to play it as a B-movie, which gave them much more leway. as far as outlandish concepts.
The game is really two games: A shooter and a horror game. As a shooter, it works pretty well. The firefights work, the weapons are varied enough and fun, with smart bad guys at least on par with the humanoids in the half-life series. Occasionally, you get to fire a big guy in a suit of armor with a better weapon or a walking tank. However, the gunfights do get a bit repetitive after a while, and frankly, if you've played one gunfight, you've played them all. Extraction point has some more intense gunfights but not enough to really save it.
Which leaves the horror part. This is harder to quantify, since horror, like humor, is subjective and what scares one person will leave another laughing(like the jackasses behind me laughing at The Orphanage last week). Every so often, the creepy noises will play, the screen will flicker and you'll see something Scary or "Scary". Sometimes you'll find yourself in a hallucinatory nightmare which is, if not unsettling, does tend to reveal the storyline somewhat. Some are rather effective, while others are less so. However, more often, the game prefers to lead you into a room with a couple dozen gallons of blood splattered all over the walls, like Jackson Pollack cut himself and decided to use his own blood because he'd run out of paint. And while really gory and disturbing at first, it gets really, really old pretty quickly. After a while, unless you are easily scared or grossed out, the blood will pretty much stop affecting you after the first few gore-filled rooms and just becomes another distraction to the otherwise dull environments. However, I will say that the best combination of such elements are the creepy nearly invisible demon-ghost things in extraction point, which are the closest things I've seen so far to evil shadows that lunge seemingly out of nowhere to strike(incidentally, This was what I was expecting in Thief: Deadly Shadows, but never got).
Which brings me to my biggest pet peeve in the game. The level design, while relatively realistic, is rather dull. The game takes you through, in the following order: Run-down urban area, industrial area, utilities plant, sewer, steam pipes, high tech commercial building, construction site, urban industrial area, high tech underground area, subway, etc, etc. I almost looked forward to the blood-soaked rooms with flayed corpses just to liven up the decor.
And while it probably seems strange, the fact that your character has no name, face, personality, voice, etc started to annoy me after a while and I don't know why. I've played many, many games with some variation of the silent protagonist(where other characters will speak to and pretend you're saying something back) or characters who had very little beyond the stock action hero persona(Serious Sam, C&C Renegade, etc). But when you are constantly being referred to as "The Fear Operative" and hear conversations going on over the radio but have no chance to interact(despite nothing apparently being wrong with your radio), it grates me, for some reason. It feels almost like you're being ignored and nobody can bother to remember your name. Like you're the unnamed errand boy who nobody bothers to get to know despite doing all the heavy lifting around the office(yes, I know, a lot of games do this, but still). I guess I know why Homer almost shot Mr. Burns because he couldn't remember his name.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that FEAR feels like a failure, even if a decent game. The shooting works well enough, but I was rarely scared, which is a cardinal sin when atmosphere and scares are a major selling point. Part of it is that it feels like a paranormal special forces team could be doing something a lot more interesting then fighting psychic clones. Sure, fighting a hoard of demons or werewolves or something isn't terribly original either, but a good presentation can overcome that. Even the most cliched story can work if done right(How many times has Romeo and Juliet been done? And Shakespeare was hardly the first person to write that particular story). Or maybe I'm so jaded or my tastes in horror are so different that I can no longer be scared easily.
Or maybe not. The fusion between the horror/action elements feels disjointed at best, and it feels like several other games that did all of these concepts a lot better before and since.
For example:
-Escape From Castle Wolfenstein had a nice supernatural horror mixed with sci-fi elements fusion that meshed nicely.
-Max Payne and Max Payne 2 did a lot of good work with bullet time battles in run-down urban settings with some nice nightmare sequences, fighting heavily armed military assholes. Ironically, Max Payne was originally going to have super soldiers as a plot device as well, but it was dropped early in development(thank god). The remains of this device can be seen in the Army bunker where it's mentioned that V was originally designed to create super soldiers(but was the program was killed due to poor results).
-Aliens Vs. Predator and Aliens Vs. Predator 2 for PC both did a good job of mixing Sci-fi with horror. In fact, both games had bits where I spent a good ten or so minutes outside a particularly creepy looking entrance because I really didn't want to go in.
-All of the Half-life games(except for maybe Blue shift) had bits which filled me with more apprehension and dread then most of FEAR did, as well as being much more claustrophobic. I felt more ill-at-ease in many more spots in Black Mesa and City 17 then I did in FEAR. Another game where the horror/sci-fi fusion worked far better then FEAR.
In summery, the game is decent ,but failed to click. I've played worse, but there are much better shooters out there.
FEAR is actually an acroynem for First Encounter Assault Recon and according to the opening titles and Manuel, is a top secret special forces unit formed within the US Army in 1992 to combat things that don't fall into the normal bounds of threats to the American People AKA the paranormal. So far so good, and while the idea of a secret government unit/agency has been used a lot over the past few years(such as The X-files, Torchwood, Clive Barker's Jericho, Hellboy, etc), I'm usually willing to give it a try despite that.
The plot goes as such: Your requisite giant, evil corporation(who probably compete with Umbrella Corp. for defense contracts) has created an army of super soldier clones who are psychically controlled by a commander named Fettle, who has spent a while in a padded cell before being let out by a creepy little ghost girl who will figure into the rest of it somehow. They then go on to start killing all the corporate goons for some reason and Fettle starts drinking the blood of certain people(it's said there's a reason but you never find out why).
In response, the Aforementioned special forces unit which, as far as I can tell, consists of 5 people total, including yourself(8 if you count the three in Perseus mandate), are sent in to a water treatment plant to stop the crazy clone action.
However, none of the fear personnel are much help, as the only other fighter disappears early in the game and his fate is never really explained. Which leaves you, a nameless, faceless, mute guy who has the ability to invoke superfast reflexes, which slows down time in a Matrix/Max Payne-ish "Bullet Time Manner". The goal, given at the beginning, with a few side quests, is to kill Fettle, which will make his 1000 or so clones go limp. Of course, knowing that, it's not exactly a spoiler to say that you will not get to do this till near the end of the game, and you will have to kill every single clone you come across in order to achieve this goal. The plot meanders around somewhat, being both thin and labiythine, with many unanswered questions, even after Extraction Point(which is really more of the same, but more intense) By the time I got to Perseus Mandate, I just didn't care anymore and stopped playing.
Normally, the following words make me wary, due to the incredible cliche-ness of them: "Clone", "super soldier", "Psychic", so when I find out that I'm fighting an army of "Psychic cloned super soldiers", My eyes started to roll heavily, but that was relieved somewhat by one of the characters saying "Psychic clones? No wonder nobody takes us seriously!" And I'll give it props for at least admitting that bad guys tend to be clones anyway, but there's not really any need due to the fact all of the enemies wear full body armor. Unfortunately, that's not enough to save the concept. Red Alert 2 pulled off the psychic clone thing rather well, but then again, EA was smart enough to play it as a B-movie, which gave them much more leway. as far as outlandish concepts.
The game is really two games: A shooter and a horror game. As a shooter, it works pretty well. The firefights work, the weapons are varied enough and fun, with smart bad guys at least on par with the humanoids in the half-life series. Occasionally, you get to fire a big guy in a suit of armor with a better weapon or a walking tank. However, the gunfights do get a bit repetitive after a while, and frankly, if you've played one gunfight, you've played them all. Extraction point has some more intense gunfights but not enough to really save it.
Which leaves the horror part. This is harder to quantify, since horror, like humor, is subjective and what scares one person will leave another laughing(like the jackasses behind me laughing at The Orphanage last week). Every so often, the creepy noises will play, the screen will flicker and you'll see something Scary or "Scary". Sometimes you'll find yourself in a hallucinatory nightmare which is, if not unsettling, does tend to reveal the storyline somewhat. Some are rather effective, while others are less so. However, more often, the game prefers to lead you into a room with a couple dozen gallons of blood splattered all over the walls, like Jackson Pollack cut himself and decided to use his own blood because he'd run out of paint. And while really gory and disturbing at first, it gets really, really old pretty quickly. After a while, unless you are easily scared or grossed out, the blood will pretty much stop affecting you after the first few gore-filled rooms and just becomes another distraction to the otherwise dull environments. However, I will say that the best combination of such elements are the creepy nearly invisible demon-ghost things in extraction point, which are the closest things I've seen so far to evil shadows that lunge seemingly out of nowhere to strike(incidentally, This was what I was expecting in Thief: Deadly Shadows, but never got).
Which brings me to my biggest pet peeve in the game. The level design, while relatively realistic, is rather dull. The game takes you through, in the following order: Run-down urban area, industrial area, utilities plant, sewer, steam pipes, high tech commercial building, construction site, urban industrial area, high tech underground area, subway, etc, etc. I almost looked forward to the blood-soaked rooms with flayed corpses just to liven up the decor.
And while it probably seems strange, the fact that your character has no name, face, personality, voice, etc started to annoy me after a while and I don't know why. I've played many, many games with some variation of the silent protagonist(where other characters will speak to and pretend you're saying something back) or characters who had very little beyond the stock action hero persona(Serious Sam, C&C Renegade, etc). But when you are constantly being referred to as "The Fear Operative" and hear conversations going on over the radio but have no chance to interact(despite nothing apparently being wrong with your radio), it grates me, for some reason. It feels almost like you're being ignored and nobody can bother to remember your name. Like you're the unnamed errand boy who nobody bothers to get to know despite doing all the heavy lifting around the office(yes, I know, a lot of games do this, but still). I guess I know why Homer almost shot Mr. Burns because he couldn't remember his name.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that FEAR feels like a failure, even if a decent game. The shooting works well enough, but I was rarely scared, which is a cardinal sin when atmosphere and scares are a major selling point. Part of it is that it feels like a paranormal special forces team could be doing something a lot more interesting then fighting psychic clones. Sure, fighting a hoard of demons or werewolves or something isn't terribly original either, but a good presentation can overcome that. Even the most cliched story can work if done right(How many times has Romeo and Juliet been done? And Shakespeare was hardly the first person to write that particular story). Or maybe I'm so jaded or my tastes in horror are so different that I can no longer be scared easily.
Or maybe not. The fusion between the horror/action elements feels disjointed at best, and it feels like several other games that did all of these concepts a lot better before and since.
For example:
-Escape From Castle Wolfenstein had a nice supernatural horror mixed with sci-fi elements fusion that meshed nicely.
-Max Payne and Max Payne 2 did a lot of good work with bullet time battles in run-down urban settings with some nice nightmare sequences, fighting heavily armed military assholes. Ironically, Max Payne was originally going to have super soldiers as a plot device as well, but it was dropped early in development(thank god). The remains of this device can be seen in the Army bunker where it's mentioned that V was originally designed to create super soldiers(but was the program was killed due to poor results).
-Aliens Vs. Predator and Aliens Vs. Predator 2 for PC both did a good job of mixing Sci-fi with horror. In fact, both games had bits where I spent a good ten or so minutes outside a particularly creepy looking entrance because I really didn't want to go in.
-All of the Half-life games(except for maybe Blue shift) had bits which filled me with more apprehension and dread then most of FEAR did, as well as being much more claustrophobic. I felt more ill-at-ease in many more spots in Black Mesa and City 17 then I did in FEAR. Another game where the horror/sci-fi fusion worked far better then FEAR.
In summery, the game is decent ,but failed to click. I've played worse, but there are much better shooters out there.
