| FEAR pc review - F.E.a.r pc game review |
Tension rides the air like electricity, while the light at the end of the dark corridor continues to flicker. All of a sudden the heads up display crackles with interference, and the ceiling boards drop as if someone is hiding up there. You turn around to see that it is as far back as it is forward, and there doesn’t seem to be any escape from the corridor. All of a sudden a body is thrown through the window, spraying glass as it flies through the air, although it is against your every single bit of training you open fire wildly, spraying the walls with lead and tearing huge chunks from the interior. It becomes obvious that you aren’t hitting a whole lot of anything, but you continue to pull the trigger, and you pull it and pull it until it goes click. The only sounds to be heard now are the clinking of spent shells or the clatter of rubble as it slowly peels from the walls.
Amid the destruction a figure emerges and charges straight for you, only his outline is visible, his cloaking device betrayed by the blanket of dust that you have just created. There isn’t enough time to reload and he’s getting really close. It is know that panic wipes all trace of thought in your mind, and you have just felt, the F.E.A.R.
This is one of the most tense, and exciting action FPS games that I have played, which isn’t surprising as it is from Monolith who also created Alien Vs Predator 2, a game that in it’s own time was considered as one of the most hair raising games of all time.
It isn’t just the tension that Monolith have executed perfectly within this game it is the beauty of it. Although F.E.A.R. may not be brilliant to look at from some screen shots, with typical generic grey and beige corridors, but when you activate the slo-mo feature the games visual quality seems almost to be a form of art.
When activating the slo-mo feature, not only does everything slow down, but the picture somehow seems much sharper, as bullets fly through the air, wagging their air resistance tails, and throwing around every single piece of scenery that they come into contact with. The glorious explosions as well that send bodies flying through the air is a sight to behold.
At the heart of this game is a very basic premise, just travel forwards through the levels until you come to the game’s end. But the controls and the graphics and the sound are done so perfectly that even though the game play mechanics have been seen a thousand times before, it is like looking upon them with fresh eyes.
The AI is very unpredictable as well, and soldiers will often call for back up if they feel that you are getting the better of them, and the opposition will also try at every opportunity to flank, or flush out the player with grenades.
Tactics come into play very often with F.E.A.R. especially with the weapons, as there strengths and weaknesses have been balanced perfectly. You will not find yourself slowly graduating up the gun scale and then sticking with the most powerful. The variation amongst them, and the impact that they have on the different types of enemy will have players thinking twice before they hang all of their hope upon a rocket launcher.
With such a simple level structure you may be forgiven for thinking that the plot of F.E.A.R. is as bad as a Bruce Willis quip, but it isn’t. The plot seems to be the bastard lovechild of the movies S.W.A.T and the Ring, where a little girl seems to be terrorising the city with the aide of a renegade experimental army faction. So while the plot isn’t ground breaking in anyway, it is certainly involving. And the player is given the motivation to play through the game in order to find out what happens at the end. Where this game differs from most though is the player is free to uncover, or just ignore some of the facts behind the experiments that have been taking place at the order of the government. This allows players to carve out their own pace as they charge through the game, whereas players who like to explore or enjoy plots with rich interwoven plots, can go around reading all of the emails, and finding all of the phones and listen to the voice mail. However as good as the plot is, with game play this good it is almost irrelevant. If the back story to the game were having to save the last pink rhinoceros from ninjas, players would still want to complete it.
It is great to once again play a first person shooter that has no gimmicks yet manages to keep the player entertained. Playing through this reminded me of the first time that I played Doom, the hesitation to investigate further on down the corridor, just in case you bump into any extra enemies. And while we have been lucky enough to receive updates to the Quake and Doom franchise, I think that it is fair to say that they were a little disappointing. Even Prey didn’t fully live up to it’s expectations of revolutionising level design, so it is good to finally play a fps that has stuck to the basics, and achieved a game that is highly playable with a high replay factor.
Right then, I’m not going to be beaten by a little girl, where’s my wallet. I’m going to run down to the shops and buy the add on pack…
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