Multiplayer works a treat
And that’s the crux of it with F.E.A.R. on the PS3, either poor porting, sloppy programming or (worse) lack of hardware ‘oomph’ all conspire or combine to make F.E.A.R. much less of an experience than it should have been. And it really hurt to write that as I just love F.E.A.R. to bits on the PC.That said, there’s still a good game here, provided you don’t mind the glitches which pop up to ruin the atmosphere and immersion. But the caveat to that is that you’ll only get the most out of it if you’ve not played F.E.A.R. on other platforms. At the risk of annoying the entire console fraternity, the PC version, to my mind, is the best, followed by the Xbox 360 version and trailed by this PS3 attempt. Sorry, but that’s how it is.
For those of you new to the game you’ll find the single player campaign an enjoyable challenge as the enemy AI, a hotly disputed usurper to Half Life 2’s AI, is bloody good. Wound these guys and they’ll take cover, they’ll talk to each other and react as a team. In fact, depending on how ‘gung-ho’ you are, you can play the same level over again and have it play out differently each time as the AI reacts differently to your attacks.
Click for larger imageNow the multiplayer side of things was of particular interest as I spent many a happy hour scissor kicking my way around the maps (until they patched F.E.A.R. to make melee attacks less powerful). With the PS3 version of F.E.A.R. you get the usual Deathmatch, CTF, team and elimination matches as you’d find with pretty much every shooter.
What was interesting was how smooth the whole thing felt though this did serve to highlight just how much work Sony still have to do on the PS3’s online modes. This is no criticism of F.E.A.R. but the fact that any multiplayer Xbox 360 game is so seamlessly integrated into the Xbox Live system only serves to highlight how rubbish the PlayStation Network still is by comparison. Once in games though there was no appreciable lag, even when playing over a wireless connection to my router.
The multiplayer mode served to show the lack of voice support too... A CTF game on the PC using Ventrillo, or just Xbox Live on the Xbox 360, is a far more coherent and challenging game than this PS3 version. But hey, this is early days and we can but hope that Sony pull their finger out, eh?
Click for larger image