REVIEW: F.E.A.R.

March 16, 2007

F.E.A.R. is now down for the count. Took me a while to get around to playing it, but it is now finished! Overall, I enjoyed it, but thought it could of used some work in some areas. I don't know if it was me, but I found the demo of Fear to be MUCH scarier than the retail. Maybe because I was mostly playing it during the day, but it didn't make me jump out of my seat as much as it did when I played the short demo... maybe I just knew what to expect. Lets go into some more detail.

Fear uses Monolith's Jupiter EX engine, and it looks really great. Unlike Monolith's other games such as No One Lives Forever, Fear takes a much more realistic approach. The faces of the models look really great and the graphics in general make the game very dark and creepy. It also ran pretty good on my machine. I don't have the greatest machine in the world, but I was able to run everything at at least high and it run pretty smooth. Always a good thing. :)

Sound is one of the best things Monolith seems to do in all their games, and Fear is no exception. Easily the best part of this game. This game really isn't about things jumping out and scaring the shit out of you, its more about setting the mood and getting under your skin. Its one of those things where you look down a hall way, and you just think to yourself "Man, I really don't wanna go down there." The sound effects made me jump out of my seat a few times... really something to check out if you aren't into FPS really. Its that cool.

Gameplay. For the most part, very solid. The gun-play is really sweet and if I had to describe it, its sort of like Half-Life 2 meets Max Payne. The whole game takes place in the first person, (like Hal-Life... like there are no cut scenes where you leave the first person view) plus you have "super reflexes" aka bullet time when you get into firefights. The enemy A.I. is pretty smart too. They will cover when they need to and also try to flank you. You will hear them talking to each other giving themselves updates on where they think you are. Something like "He is hiding behind the wall." Its also the first time I have ever seen A.I. point out when it see a flashlight.. so you could be sneaking up to them, and then one of them might yell out "Flashlight!" and all get ready to attack. Not a huge deal, but I though it was neat.

Although, what made the game cool also hurts the game as well. The first person only view... while something like this works perfectly in a game like Half-Life, it doesn't work so well in Fear. Let me give you an example.... there is one part in Half-Life 2: Episode 1, where you find your self back in the Citadel and you are making your way on some catwalks. There is a small cue where a solider starts to shoot at you from one side of the area, and obviously, you are going to focus your attention over there and take him out. When you take him out and you are still looking over there, you see one of those flying ship things come whipping around the corner, and then you start to focus on that. While it starts to fly away, part of the Citadel blows up and just totally slams into it, and you are sort get an "Oh shit!" moment. With Fear on the other hand, I constantly found my self looking the wrong way when something major happens and totally ruining the "Oh shit" moment they could of had. I found my self reloading a sections over again just so I could see what I might of missed or where I was supposed to be looking. By that point there "scare" wasn't all that scary and was more or less a "oh.... that's it?" Maybe its just one of those things Valve has more practice with, but I thought Fear could of used a little more work... or maybe its just me.

And yeah... that's pretty much it I guess. I am interested in checking out what the expansion pack is all about, but that isn't made by Monolith so I don't know if its even worth checking out... I heard its pretty good though. Monolith sure knows how to make a kick butt FPS though, and I look forward to seeing what they make next.