F.E.A.R.

Ever been scared of a little girl? No? Apparently you've never played little game called First Encounter Assault Recon (or met my sister). My purchase of F.E.A.R. was a response to my playing Dementium (I reviewed it earlier). It was pretty much the same game with a more confusing, yet less pointless, story. It had more action, less locked doors, and was actually pretty terrifying.

Your name is "F.E.A.R. Point Man" in all the mission descriptions, so there's no need to get personally attached to your character: you never see his face anyway. Here's the storyline: there's a crazy psychic that can control hundreds of clone soldiers, and he's gotten loose. Your mission is to go fetch him. I'm not going to spoil anything, so you don't have to worry about that. While trying to capture him, you learn many secrets about the corporation that had the mysterious "Project Origin" commissioned. You also get the heck frightened out of you by a little creepy girl that enjoys projecting ghoulish images and nightmares into your head. This becomes one of the more annoying points, but I'll get to that in the gameplay.

F.E.A.R. runs like a standard FPS in that you get guns and you shoot people. The arsenal provided at the beginning is pretty boring: a pistol and a sub-machine gun. You can hold up to three weapons or two pistols and two other weapons. The other weapons would be your standard for most games: shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, and some non-conventional weapons like an auto-cannon, a nail driver, and the particle weapon. There are also a few types of grenades such as frags, motion activated, and remote detonation. The key feature that separates this game from all the other PC FPS games out there is the SloMo feature. The game explains the SloMo as your having amazing reflexes, and they ain't kidding. The world moves 1/5 speed and you move twice as fast. This means you can run out into the middle of a squad of soldiers, take aim with your dual pistols, and shoot and kick people to your heart's content without heavy fear of people completely destroying you. However, sometimes you will enter points in the game where you can't activate your Reflex Mode. These are the nightmare sequences that the little girl, Alma, sends you in order to thwart your efforts. They generally involve disturbing images of gore or frightening flashbacks. Nothing to worry about though...but it does suck to get startled when you weren't expecting one. The music definitely is what scared me the most. When you don't know when your flashlight is going to go out (leaving me alone in my room with the lights off and creepy music blaring into my headphones) and the music goes minor on you, be prepared to fight off some freaky ghost things.

For a game with such great battle mechanics, I really hated the physics engine sometimes. When I'd drop some poor fool, his body would keep making the collapsing noise every time he twitched on the ground due to some kind of tension. It's really hard to get scared at all the blood and creepy images flashing about when there's a dead guy doing the milkshake dance at you. All in all, it's a fantastic game with excellent graphics, decent story, excellent gun fights, and truly terrifying, Kafkaesque (that's my favorite word) sequences. There are a few expansion packs...they aren't really worth it, but it you feel like I just didn't want to comment on them...go get them. Project Origin is the upcoming sequel; I can't wait.

Rating: B+