F.E.A.R.

Game:

In this first person shooter, you shoot people! You go into rooms and shoot clones, then go into other rooms and shoot more clones! Play long enough and you'll shoot guys who aren't clones, yet they all look alike! Then you shoot some more clones. Bang, bang, bang!

Um, shouldn't there be something more here?

Comments:

F.E.A.R. has of course been released, played, reviewed and expanded upon long before I got my grubby little mitts on it. Hey, whad'ya want, I just bought a 360 last month after filing my taxes. (Kudos, increasingly desperate Bush economic agenda!) F.E.A.R. wasn't first on my 'to play' list (thank Nyarlathotep) but when it did finally arrive, I tore into it like a chubby kid on bacon cheeseburger. And now, I'm going to tear into it again.
This, this was the game everyone was screaming about?
I hate to be contrarian, but for life of me I can't help being monumentally disappointed at this shallow, dated, and let's not mince words, intolerably boring little shooter.

I just can't figure out the crew at Monolith. Given their output in the early 90's (Well, 'Blood') I among many others expected a never-ending stream of cool from their general direction. There's been some highpoints since then ('Silent Hill Origins', and…) but oh lordy when you leave the monkeys to themselves, get ready to dodge some poo. Monolith, and F.E.A.R. in particular, are crippled by a lamentable 'think inside the box' mentality. (And a cramped, dingy little box it is.) I don't know who, I don't know why in the holy hell, but someone has repeated the team's epically boneheaded move of setting a horror fps inside a series of industrial buildings. In case any color or nuance might sneak into the picture, the plot of F.E.A.R. has you combating a battalion of mind-controlled clones. Which means with rare exceptions you'll be fighting the same enemy over and over again until you beat the game, die, or vomit from tedium. Hooray!
Yes, this is the game of the year, why wouldn't you expect to find yourself wandering through the same dismal gray halls over and over again, shooting endlessly interchangeable masked cannon fodder? I hate to be such a damn curmudgeon, but Monolith hasn't learned one damn thing about dynamic level design since the depressing days of 'Blood 2'.
Graphics are theoretically passing. I say this because F.E.A.R. looks as if it could process data on the level of 'Doom 3', if someone had actually bothered to program anything into it other than office furniture and dirty wallpaper. (But man, those player status bars looks just as good as anything in Halo!)
Potential and application are two different critters, and it must be said that in spots F.E.A.R. looks less like a 360 game than it does first-generation xbox. (The player's hands in particular jut out like angular prosthetics, hovering detached over the battlefield.) Character models are a mixed bag. The two other F.E.A.R. operatives you encounter manage to avoid the plastic mannequin look, if only by keeping their distance. (And it should be noted that voice acting is excellent. No 90lb programmers pretending to be monsters here.) Later on in the game however, you'll run across a Dennis Nedry type, whose looped square-headed Cheetos scarfing animation is jarringly Ps2. While objects are either slightly wobbly or bolted down, much attention is lavished on combat physics aspect of the game. Cute enough, but we're living in a Valve world now, are rag doll physics still that all-fired impressive? Monolith's music department has likewise sunk far since the glory days of 'Blood'. It rarely rises above the level of innocuous, and then only to be annoying. The programming itself isn't bad, but there are some unpolished pointy bits. You'll find yourself stuck immobile in bad polygon angles or brushing a corner and seeing the inside of your own head way too damn often. Normally I wouldn't come down quite so hard on a game like F.E.A.R., but dear God this is lackluster, especially considering what the next gen consoles and pcs are capable of. I've seen the opening of 'Bioshock' son, don't shovel dreary corridors filled with blank crates at me and expect hosannas.

I must say I find it bloody hypocritical that so many of my fellow nerds carped about 'Doom 3' for not emulating the 'Half Life 2' engine in every way, but heaped mountains of praise upon 'F.E.A.R.'s creaky old mechanics.
The combat itself is the game's best point, given the aforementioned ragdoll physics and some impressive AI. To give credit, it would have been an easy and childish step to make an army of clones spiritless robotic killers. Instead, not only does the player encounter strategic thinking in opponents, but actual panic and frustration from them when they're under fire. Even if your monochromatic foes aren't as shallow as they might have been, the firefights you find yourself in are pretty under whelming. This is due not only in part to the 'corridor shoot, rinse, repeat' level of action, but some slightly iffy controls as well. The game isn't frustrating to play, but tasks such as aiming and jumping are awkward in way I can't really put my finger on. Due to this lack of precision some of the more nuanced wrinkles in gameplay, such as leaning around cover, are not as useful as they should be. Soon I found myself resorting to the same old strafe and crush techniques I've used since I first booted up 'Doom'. (God I'm old.)
Again, the control of F.E.A.R. isn't putrid, but it needed a lot more thought put into it. Is it really ideal to have to hold down X to interact with a ladder, rather than just approaching it like in most sensible games? Hell, for that matter what sense does it make to only pick up needed ammo and health packs half the time, requiring button interaction with the other half. This stems partly from the game's weapons-switching interface. F.E.A.R. lets the player choose three guns at a time. Unfortunately, again, Monolith has cooked up one or two cool weapons, and a full menu of underpowered white rice machine guns. For example, The shotgun is impressive, even at medium to long range, but the 'Deep Penetrator' (snicker) could have been renamed the Japanese accountant for all the stopping power it has. Likewise the rocket and cannon guns have the damage radius of a water balloon, and the Asp rifle has to be the most inaccurate scoped weapon ever programmed.
If a scaled-down F.E.A.R. had been released about the same time as the first 'Half-Life' I suppose its imprecise pedestrian gameplay could have been accepted as revolutionary. Today, it's just a boxful of lazy.

As you might guess, the sterility posed by unending office halls, warehouses and boiler rooms is about as fertile ground for chills as the Sahara is for pumpkins. The setup is that there's this creepy guy that eats people, the psychic commander of the clones you're fighting. You're sent in to eliminate him and find out why he's butchered the employees of a weapon's research firm. Basically that's it, you chase the guy, he moves, you chase him to where he moved to, etc.
Every now and then the game has to literally drag you out of itself to try and be creepy. During these overused slo-mo sojourns from reality, you'll be menaced not only by the shade of your preternatural nemesis, but that of a ghostly little girl who can kill people with her mind. (Yeah, yeah, seven days, whateva'…)
In order to inject a little horror into their horror game, the designers rely on spring loaded cat scares. Charred skeletons fall out of ceiling tiles and bloody corpses occasionally litter the halls, but it's all so trite the impact just isn't there. Mirroring 'Doom 3's pdas, F.E.A.R.'s back story is mapped out not by your actions in the game, or the figures you encounter therein, but by messages left on answering machines and data uploaded from abandoned laptops. Because we all know how deeply satisfying 'Doom 3's story was. (*Cough*) To be fair, the narrative does get more energetic towards the end. Yes, after ten levels of square rooms and floppy corpses the game stops being banal and simply begins plagiarizing 'Silent Hill' and 'Ringu' with both hands! No longer content to chuck endless interchangeable soldiers at you, F.E.A.R. ends up chucking endless, interchangeable ghosts at you, as you fight the flame-ringed ghost of Alyssa Sadako Samara Alma.

Well ok, time to put down my trench bludgeon. F.E.A.R. isn't a terrible shooter, but it's one I would have stopped playing after a level or so if I didn't have a review to write. To hear it lauded as a masterpiece makes me wonder less about the state of game journalism than it convinces me I've finally lost my wee liver-snap mind.
I kid of course; I still wore short pants when I saw the ass-end of my marbles.

And since I'll never top the surreal absurdity of that closing sentence, review over!

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