First Encounter Assault Conclusion... F.E.A.C.?
This is the part of the review I hate doing, where I have to try and gel my previous pages of rambling into a few coherent sentences, so all those of you who skip to the end can just get on and find out whether this is worth getting or not. So let’s just do a quick re-cap. By far the strongest aspect of F.E.A.R. is its storytelling with an original and enjoyable storyline making the game well worth playing to see what happens. Also on the upside are the graphics which make full use of all those wonderful graphical tricks we’ve been told the latest graphics cards can do. However, on the downside there are a few anomalies such as the bullet damage decals which look to be a totally different resolution from their surroundings and though they make use of pixel bump-mapping to give the crater depth, they look odd and out of place.
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Click for larger imageThe AI is another of F.E.A.R.’s strong points being something the game can rightly be proud of. The AI really make a huge difference to the game itself, though they don’t really fit in with the storyline of being mindless clones especially when you hear them expressing an individual will to live. The firefights in F.E.A.R. have to be some of the best yet in an FPS, with the bullet time and plaster clouds making this feel at times like the game The Matrix should have been. Although there’s a comparatively limited range of weaponry, the broader range of melee attacks makes up for it, giving you plenty of scope to go in with guns blazing and then switch to some high kicking action to finish off the bad guys.
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Click for larger imageLastly, and this will be the most contentious bit, for me F.E.A.R. has buckets of atmosphere and is genuinely scary in places. Of course, different people find different things scary and I loved the whole idea of this mysterious little girl who is the ghostly embodiment of malice and bloody revenge. Others might well find this tedious and dull and might be scared by sudden, gruesome events. F.E.A.R. relies more on building tension and scaring you with supernatural events, but this requires your ‘buy-in’ and suspension of disbelief, something which is tricky to do in a video game. Those who play this purely as another FPS to see what it has to offer will be missing out though and it’s well worth waiting ‘till late at night and playing F.E.A.R. in the dark… then and only then, will you get the full effect of F.E.A.R.
Pros
Great storyline, well told
Genuinely scary in places, if this sort of thing scares you
Cracking firefights
Intelligent AI
Graphics impact upon gameplay
Range of melee attacks
Cons
Some graphical effects look out of place
Lack of variation in enemies can become repetitive
Needs a meaty system to be seen at its best
The closest anyone’s come to digital Exlax so far
F.E.A.R. was reviewed on the HEXUS.gaming Test Rig.
