Scary system specs
So now we come to the big kicker, the graphics. Are they the great leap forward? Are you now going to have to go out and buy yet another bleeding edge card to run F.E.A.R.? Well, the answer is yes they are, sort of… and no, you’re not… probably. Answers which are about as useful as chocolate teapot, so allow me to explain. From the eye candy viewpoint, F.E.A.R. does some stuff that looks very cool indeed, such as detailed real time shadowing, volumetric fogging and real time reflections. Putting this lot together along with the pixel bump-mapping makes F.E.A.R. look very tasty indeed.
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Click for larger imageBut where F.E.A.R. falls down is when these effects aren’t in evidence because it’s then that you really notice they’re missing. For example, you might be in an underground sewer and as you creep the corner, you marvel at the bump mapping which throws the rough surface of the wall into sharp relief, revealing every little pit and hole. But move on a few bit further and you might be presented with a rather bland, tiled hallway where there’s no evidence of these graphical tricks and the walls look as flat as Half Life. It’s a bit disappointing as you’d expect a tiled wall to have even more shiny edges and uppy downy bits. ( ‘uppy downy’? That a technical term?- Ed) Similarly, the overall look of the game has a samey feel to it, with a huge proportion of the game taking place indoors you soon notice that everything is nice straight lines and neat corners. Even in maintenance areas, where you’d expect to see exposed concrete battered by wear and tear, the architecture and apparent level of workmanship is something that’d make a British builder weep with shame.
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Click for larger imageNow the major downer for those of us on a budget is that F.E.A.R. some serious hardware power to get it running smoothly at its best. My AMD Sempron 2800, ATI 9800XT system struggled to get a playable framerate at 1024x768 unless a lot of the details were set low. On the plus side, F.E.A.R.’s self-configuration system pretty much set the game up properly for that system’s abilities. However, switching over to the HEXUS.gaming Test Rig. and F.E.A.R. flew along quite happily and looked ‘les ballons du chien’ too. So although F.E.A.R. will push your hardware somewhat, anyone with a recent graphics card needn’t start to consigned it to Ebay just yet.
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