It was F.E.A.R. that pulled me, for the first time in twenty years of gaming, into first-person shooters. Like everyone else, I played my fair share of id’s shooters throughout the ‘90s. But being a console gamer, my time with turn-of-the-century FPSs, games that saw the genre evolve into a serious creative force and not just “Doom clones”, was always second-hand. I downloaded the demo for F.E.A.R. off of Xbox Live just looking for something to play and was entranced. The scares weren’t exactly gripping. Spooky little girl walks down the hall and *GASP* disappears! Walk into a room that’s covered in bloooOOOoood and then *WHOA* it’s not! The action, though, was unlike anything else I’d played up until 2006 thanks to the game’s still-impressive enemy AI. Walking down a hallway with the barrel of a shotgun jutting from the base of the screen was something I was used to. Bad guys jumping through windows to avoid exploding grenades and cursing at me wasn’t. Every single encounter was dangerous and forced you to consider how you moved through the mundane office cubicles and hallways that made up the bulk of the game’s setting.
Unfortunately, F.E.A.R. was a classic example of how a game needs to have more than just an excellent set of fundamental rules to be great. Despite the incredible programming that made the baddies so interesting, there wasn’t much else to F.E.A.R. Every environment was the same, the story too vague to ever really hook you. After nine hours of wandering through identical hallways and realizing I was only three-quarters of the way through the game, I shelved it, opting to watch the ending on YouTube rather than finish it myself.
If the demo of F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin I played today is indicative of the entire game, I think I’ll be finishing the whole thing this time out. It seems I wasn’t the only one fatigued by the repetitive environments of the first game as the first thing associate producer Eric Studer pointed out was both the variety of the game’s levels and the development team’s emphasis on an expanded color palette. Visually, F.E.A.R. 2 has more in common with the over-saturated primary colors of Monolith’s Condemned 2 than its predecessor, to its benefit. The second big change in the sequel is the more explicit narrative. F.E.A.R.’s story was told through voicemail recordings and other incidental environmental finds, and while it was an interesting touch to make the exposition an optional part of the game, it was far too easy to miss these bits of information. It’s hard to care about a plot if you have no idea what’s actually at stake. F.E.A.R. 2 takes a page out of the Half-Life playbook by letting you play through cutscenes (albeit in a limited capacity) and actually giving this outing’s silent protagonist a name and history. The game’s first level, picking up thirty minutes before the end of F.E.A.R., is immediately engaging. Play wise, the game felt at home with the Xbox 360’s controller, sticking close to the usual triggers-for-shooting, analog-sticks-for-moving that act as the standard for most FPS and the enemy AI was cagey as ever. I was actually treated to a look at two of the game’s new enemies as well, Specters and Remnants (disembodied human souls and soulless bodies respectively.) They’re an interesting change of pace from the militaristic opponents that populated the first game but I wasn’t able to tell from the demonstration whether they have the same versatility as AI’s that the soldiers do.
All told, F.E.A.R. 2 looks like everything a sequel should be: a dramatic expansion and improvement on the original that does away with its failures. Bigger, for once, may actually be better.
Related links:
The Art of Gore in Project Origin
The Strange Case of Hype
The 61FPS Review: Dead Space
Trailer Review: The Conduit
Meet People (Yay!) On the Internet (Oh.) Play Games With Them (Fine, I Guess…)