F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

he one word review: “fine”. Just fine. That’s what FEAR 2 is.

It’s a back-handed compliment, to be sure.  Kicking off just before the end of the first FEAR game, you’re plonked into the shoes of faceless mute Beckett, part of a Special Forces team being sent after one of the heads of Armacham Technology Corporation, the evil Alma-creating company from the first game. Things go predictably pear-shaped in the early stages of the game (and if you played FEAR to completion, you’ll know how) and you soon find yourself fighting familiar ATC and Replica soldiers together with the odd monster and spectral manifestations courtesy of Alma. The poor girl has gone utterly batshit on the entire city now she’s been released and she’s very interested in your good self.

As a shooter FEAR 2 is solid and Monolith have improved or fixed some of the niggles found in FEAR. For a start, they’ve gotten the guns right. In the first game most of the weapons lacked any sense of feedback and you were often short of ammo for the few good ones. Not so this time out. The weapons are all changed (though they’ve kept a version of the fan-favourite Penetrator from the first game) but they now all sound and feel suitably powerful when used. A more tactile sense to the guns and plenty of ammunition for them goes a surprisingly long way towards keeping the combat engaging. The enemy A.I. is also razor sharp. Expect to be flanked, have plenty of grenades thrown your way to flush you out of cover and for the enemy to constantly use the environment to their advantage. They’ll always knock over desks and bookcases to create their own cover if there’s none handy, and now you can do the same with appropriate objects at the tap of a key. You’ll never, ever need to use that ability, but it’s a nice perk to have none the less. The game’s trademark slow-motion ability remains intact and unchanged. That’s all fine, and largely the minimum of improvements and tweaks you’d expect for a sequel from a developer of this caliber.

Other additions don’t work at all. The game’s odd twist on the quick time event just further demonstrates how rubbish that particular mechanic is. Several times you’ll be prompted to furiously tap a mouse button to swat Alma away from you or finish off an enemy hand-to-hand. The icon prompting you is tiny meaning you’ll be watching that instead of what’s happening in the game, and in one instance you’ll need to time a second, different mouse tap with no warning. If you don’t, the event will repeat, seemingly indefinitely (I let it go on three times before becoming bored) until you finally get it right.The mech combat sections also disappoint. I was initially quite excited by their inclusion when I played the demo, but replaying those sections in the game highlight the problems. What you pilot is billed as elite powered armour, but it doesn’t make you feel powerful. You feel restricted and handicapped. Your movement speed is reduced, your slow-mo ability is disabled and you can’t really see or hear anything (even with heat vision engaged). Your weapons make mincemeat of regular enemies and short work of enemy armour, but that removes the challenge of the combat. The only challenge you’ll face in the suit is trying to see your targets through the smoke and in spite of your suit’s rubbish visual display. It’s ultimately more fun to proceed on foot in these sections. They’re the most open of the combat areas (to accommodate the suits) and there’s a smidge of vertical combat (with enemies on multiple levels) to alleviate the plod.

The rest of the environments you fight in are largely uninteresting, however, with the possible exception of the elementary school you might have seen featured in the demo. Despite Monolith’s claim that they wanted the sequel to break out a bit from the dark, repetitive corridors of FEAR, they simply haven’t done that. The maps feel like they give you a bit more breathing room with a bit more to explore but this is still arrow-straight (and often very transparent) corridor combat. To make up for this the environments have been peppered with suspicious amounts of collectible intelligence and documentation in an attempt to flesh out the world and it can be quite rewarding to pick up these tidbits as you go. It adds to and helps support a story the game doesn’t do a very good job of telling. It takes for granted you’ve played and remember most of its predecessor and leaves it up to you to try and fill in the gaps with these pickups if you haven’t. It ultimately doesn’t do a good enough job of engaging you, which is odd because it’s clear Monolith are quite invested in the world they’ve created and the character of Alma. There’s hints of good writing and storytelling here and there, and some lovely incidental touches to some levels, but you’ll find them very hard to spot.

But where the game really falls down is in its scares, or lack there of. FEAR 2 tries very hard to “do” horror, but it never succeeds properly. Its first, and only, tactic is to jump out from a dark corner and shout “Boo!” every so often. You might remember this strategy from the original game. It worked then, mostly, not because it was exactly new but because it was presented in a way we hadn’t seen before. Ultra-slick ultra-violence with a creepy girl lifted right out of a Japanese horror flick. There was gore and darkness and the occasional inspired hallucination. The original made you jump and it made you sweat with its cheap tricks and impressive visual effects, but by the end of it you’d become a little numb, a little too accustomed to things. The problem with FEAR 2 is that it does things exactly the same way as its predecessor when it comes to producing the scares and that quickly falls flat. You begin to spot the patterns across the levels. First comes the shooty bit, then the quiet bit, then the bit with annoying ghosts and a dash of Alma-induced imaginings, then it’s back to a shooty bit again. The game clearly takes no risks, and it’s the slavish commitment to the original formula that handicaps any attempt to instill real terror or panic.

It just can’t foster that feeling of vulnerability necessary to make the player feel truly afraid. It does, admittedly, make things hard for itself from the off. After all, your character is a gun-toting badass who can slow down time at will and flying kick people to death. Every enemy you encounter in the game can be dispatched using a certain number of bullets, even the ghosts. The game never throws anything at you in a fight that makes you think “Holy shit, I might not be able to kill this thing!”. I can’t help but contrast FEAR 2′s attempts to scare you with something like Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. Both employ some seriously supernatural shenanigans to scare the player, but Stalker succeeds with far greater economy. Anyone who has ventured into the underground labs of that game will understand what I mean. That game excels at truly making you feel isolated and vulnerable and then is able to scare the pants off you with nothing more than the sound of silence. FEAR builds you up as a super-soldier and then expects you to be frightened of some loud noises and fancy graphical effects. It simply doesn’t work.

FEAR 2? More like FEAR 1.5. What we have here is a solid, competent shooter utterly lacking in flair or boldness of imagination. Monolith have taken four years to essentially remake the original, rather than produce a game that feels like a proper sequel. It could have been so much more. Technically it’s impressive, but underneath it’s still a straight, now slightly stale FPS that’s stuck in the same corridors and trading on the same gimmicks of its parent.
Barry White