F.E.A.R - The First 15
You’ll most likely know Vivendi best as the guys who helped to bring us the wonderful Half Life and Half Life 2… so a new shooter from them should be something look forward to, shouldn’t it?
Of course, the question was always going to be how to better Half Life 2 and its contempories like Far Cry and now Quake 4 as well and Vivendi have very sensibly opted to not just focus on the graphics and gameplay but also on the storyline too… The end result is First Encounter Assault Recon, better known and more easily typed as F.E.A.R.
If any of you have played the hugely underrated and largely ignored Clive Barker’s Undying, you’ll have a good idea of what to expect here with F.E.A.R. giving you a strong storyline that gradually unfolds as you play but with plenty of spooky supernatural stuff thrown in.
Click for larger imageTaking an enormous leaf out of Japanese style horror, it looks as though the at the centre of this spooky story is a ghostly young girl, but she is somehow linked with a wayward army officer who has the power to telepathically control a battalion of clone soldiers… He’s gone barmy and is now using his army for some as yet undiscovered purpose. Your job is to find out what’s going on and stop him.
Click for larger imageRight from the off F.E.A.R. stands out as being a superbly polished game with just about everything a player could wish for being here. Graphically it’s impressive with nicely detailed textures making full use of all the latest hardware trickery to bring to your screen what has to be the most lifelike graphics outside of a tech-demo. You’ve got real-time reflections, shadowing, misting, lens-flare, pixel bump-mapping and every other effect you could wish for and, if you’ve got the hardware to run it, you’re in for a treat.
Click for larger imageThough I’m only a short way in, the firefights in F.E.A.R. have to be some of the best you’ll ever encounter in a game to date, with every fight having strong undertones of the famous lobby scene in The Matrix. Yep, bullets that miss their targets send plumes of dust and plaster flying and letting off a whole clip across a room will soon fog up the place making it impossible to see what’s going on. Time to hunker down, reload and wait for the dust to settle to see if there’s any bad guys left.
Click for larger imageAs you play you find out through a series of creepy flashbacks that you’re not just an ordinary soldier and actually something rather special with one of your abilities being able to enter a slow-motion bullet time mode, which the game claims is due to your heightened reflexes. This makes those gunfights even more satisfying and I’ve found myself reloading a level a couple of times just for the sheer fun of getting my gun off in a room filled with flying debris, dust and bullets… it’s the best fun I’ve had in an FPS for a while.
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