Fear is kinda noted for three different things: One, slow-mo bullet time! Hard Reset has some of this too but it's way better in Fear ie actually useful. I think bullet time was supposedly pretty common at about the original Fear's era of development but the mechanic has mostly fallen off. I kinda like the mechanic since it offers you another resource to ration out in combat, though I admit it's basically a pale shadow of the Crysis suit's tactical options. For those uninformed, during slow mo you move somewhat faster and enemies move much slower and you can toggle it on or off as you go.
Second, Fear is a little unusual in being a consistent running horror fps series. Most horror games are over the shoulder third person, or are less reliant on gunplay, which makes for an odd dynamic. I have to admit straight up that I didn't find the original Fear all that scary if at all as opposed to Doom 3 which did get me a little bit here or there. But I'll talk about that more later.
Third, Fear is notable for having a story that appears to have been crafted in the most bizarre, brainstorming think tanking flow of thought manner. And by that I mean the story has conceptually solid moments but upon reflection the combined narrative is less plot more shambling gestalt. The words "cohesive" and "consistent" are completely missing from Fear, with Fear 2 likely going even a step further since it's apparently the product of some odd IP losing and gaining process.
The original Fear centres on the adventures of THE POINTMAN, who over the course of the game is blah blah who cares. There's a couple twists but they're all so far from removed from a connective context that you blink at it then shrug. The plot also centres on ALMA, who is not ATMA, a little girl who has psychic powers and they never really explain much of this. The source of her powers, which are far closer to Warhammer 40k Chaos warper stuff than any vision of 'psychic' I've ever heard of, is never really explained. Also she isn't really a little girl by the time she "dies" but they juxtapose the ideas around so as to make you think they somehow impregnated a seven year old. Multiple times. While she was in a coma. She could still talk and yell while in the coma though, since the word coma is entirely utilized for the purposes of making it sound even worse.
But it only gets worse and man oh man, I'm pretty sure Fear 2 isn't going to disappoint. What's even funnier is that for all the attempts at making the story sound heinous and "horror", I actually find the setting outright mundane. I'm not sure if this has to do with the complete higher brain function shut down necessary to absorb the science fiction elements from the story without going into convulsions or if its the general detachment of the horror elements from the primary gameplay which is shooting the bleep bleep bleep out of many dudes.(note: there are more spoilers than I would usually drop during this review!)
Oh, I forgot. Fear (the first) also had this hilarious gun that shot giant nails called, if I recall correctly, the penetrator. Fear 2 renames the gun to something else - the hammerhead, I think, since a pun is clearly better than a euphemism - but I think everyone remembers that from playing it. I feel like a bunch of development time went into nailing people to walls. There's this weird stone garden thing when you use the nail gun, afterwards you walk through the battleground and there's a bunch of dudes doing the still life thing.
Besides the Nail gun, which basically operates like a goofy chain gun, gun play in Fear 2 is ... Well, for one thing you are laser accurate on normal even before you engage the slow-mo action. Guns have very limited recoil and the accuracy ends up giving the game a middle era shooter feeling. You are allowed to carry all of the grenade types in the game and then four different weapons, with no special slot for sidearms, which allows you an impressive amount of variety in fire power. Beyond the usual weapons there are a couple odd sci-fi style guns - a PPC or whatever, and a laser pair up with the nail gun. There's also two kinds of shotguns but neither feel especially satisfying after playing with the Doom 3 boomstick. The guns are generally all about the same balance wise and all really accurate, which feels nice.The slow mo thing here couples with your already absurd accuracy to make you so ridiculously lethal in close quarters it's almost hilarious. Very similar to a Crysis game, you are rewarded for rapidly cycling in and out of your power mode. Much of combat is dipping out of cover to line up a shot or two in slow motion, then gunning your target down as you change back to normal before returning to cover to reload. Enemies like to exclaim 'how can he move like that!' as you're mowing entire squads down with impunity. This might be a side effect of playing on normal but after going through Doom 3 and Hard Reset I gotta say Fear 2 feels incredibly easy. I have died here or there but it's usually I've forgotten about the health pack system.
The original game coupled health regen under a certain % with health packs, which you were expected to stack up quite high and then use sparsely til the harder parts of the game. Fear 2 doesn't seem to have regen but has reduced health packs you don't use all that much. I end up forgetting about them most of the time, but it feels like your health as opposed to armor pool is extremely limited. Enemies can splatter you very quickly if you give them the chance to do so, but between slow mo and your accuracy you're so lethal they rarely get the chance.
Enemy variety is a bit odd. Fear 1 had really good manshooting and Fear 2 is about the same, but feels like enemies are almost all armed with the same gun and behave much the same, but I don't know why. Early on you're introduced to Abominations, which are bandaged mental patients who seek to jump on you but usage of the slow mo at close range allows you to light them up before they can ever touch you. These are very similar to the late game replica assassins who are the same but have stealth. There's also heavy armor and full on robot suit enemies as well but they feel too sparse - The game has variety, it just feels like it doesn't use it very much and it's kinda strange. You encounter enemies who use every type of gear, but most of them are automatic weapon + fragmentation grenade. It's like the imps in Doom 3, could have used other stuff but just selected not to in design? I really feel like the biggest improve in the game, beyond a bit more in the way of scripted stuff, would be just varied squads of enemy units.
I have a recurring hatred of one element in FPS games and that's the "how do I get out of this box" moment - a sensation as a "real world" location is reduced to a bizarre scenario of trying to determine where the map maker wanted you to exit the box. It's not as bad in alien environments because your brain says "this is a maze, mazes are meant to be mazed". FPS games have this issue in varying amounts; it happens sometimes in Crysis 2, rarely in Doom 3 and it is terrible in Fear 2. Fear 2 has the good idea of constructing locations in a realistic manner, but the bad idea of making doors unlocked yet inaccessible, leading to weird dead ends or broken up immersion. Some of the levels do attempt subtle or less than subtle conveyance but there's still way too many spots where I paused to look up where I was supposed to go. A tiny little padlock on the ground is not the most obvious thing.Level design overall has, well, two issues beyond that. On the plus side as I said the levels feel like attempts at functional real world locations, but the downside is they can get pretty monotonous. The other big issue is that levels often feel very empty or very sparse in terms of scripting. I mean sure, enemies do spawn in at times, but otherwise some areas are just totally barren as you walk through them. There's multiple parts in the game where I was completely confused as to why they were so empty or why there weren't more heavy armor enemies. There are two, I believe, robot sections in which you drive a mech, but they're pretty barebones in terms of gameplay.
I think parts of this has to do with the story and how it influences the level design but yeesh, well, here we go...
To talk about Fear 2's story is to talk about a serious case of unintentional dichotomy or paralleling or some such term I can't bring to mind. Alma, in theory, is supposedly a character in Fear 2 - But honestly has no attempt at characterization. Oh sure, she's the tormented and brain damaged or whatever scion of one of Armacham's lead scientists, but in terms of actually communicating or developing her ambitions, it's a pretty limited set up. More or less Alma has all the personality of a hurricane and is essentially a plot device who begins and ends with whatever the scene requires. Alma just becomes the face of the horror side of the game, resulting in her being an odd parallel to the rest of the game.
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| the sky wasn't real all along! |
I also find the whole telepathic super soldier thing a bit weird. In the original game, the replica soldiers chatter back and forth. I took this to mean, given the pointman's supposed connection to the other characters, that you were telepathically "overhearing" their communications within the proverbial telepathic network. The game doesn't really address this either way, but people seem to think these are radio conversations at which point like ... What? What's the point of telepathic super soldiers if they talk to each other on radios and there's a chain of command? As I said much earlier, it doesn't feel like the elements of this story work together at all. You have cloned super soldiers who appear to talk on radios and give orders, whose commanders are deranged lunatics. So you have ... soldiers. That you cloned. With irritating deployment requirements?
This definitely sounds like military industrial complex in action, but not the end I think they want it to sound like. Seriously there's a point in the second game where they duct tape a snarling man who has been reduced to a dog level of intelligence and he commands the soldiers to attack you. I don't really understand how this is supposed to work or what they're going for. Is this a metaphor for civilian planning in warfare? Is this the dumbest plot ever? Even when you step away from this, the story feels hacked together from the most offensive stuff the writers felt they could slip by.
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| earlier they mentioned a donkey |
So basically, you can't really die during the second parts and there's a consistent "screwing" with your HUD that denotes being in those parts of the game. Instead of being worried you're about to enter a firefight without your senses totally with you, you just relax since you're essentially playing through a FMV. It really deflates the horror elements. The third part, the walk-through-corrupt science stuff, does often have enemies but never enough to kill you as long as you allow your time slowing power to recharge before pressing forward, which becomes instinctual about ten minutes into the game. So of the eight hours I spent in the game, about five or six of those I was actually playing through the challenges of a FPS game.
Outside of the story which is, after all, pretty divorced from the gunplay I found Fear 2 moderately satisfying. The engine is very stable and solid here, and most elements are well displayed. It is a 2009 game and it's nothing impressive for its age (unlike say, Doom 3) but it's also well executed on the most part. I believe the game has FOV issues I couldn't quite fix with the ini file but I didn't find it too distracting. I get motion sick at really low FOV so I don't think it was that bad but something is off about the visual motion of the game - it feels a bit too slick and quick, somehow.
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| HORROR |
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