A brief FEAR history
I loved the original F.E.A.R, must have finished it like 3 times. Then came extraction point, the game play was good but the story was kinda lame. Mission: ” Get to the extraction point” Play entire game just to get there and then ,in a predictable event, the helicopter explodes. No progress in the story at all. The reason they had to do something that doesn’t really obstruct the real story is that extraction point and Perseus Mandate was not created by Monolith ( The creators of the original ). Then along came Perseus Mandate where you actually play a different character which gave them the ability to explore further into the FEAR universe while leaving you wondering what happened to the point man. The Perseus Mandate story was much better than extraction point but still wasn’t up to par with the original.
Then Monolith announced that F.E.A.R 2 continues from the original F.E.A.R and that Extraction point and Perseus Mandate never really happened and should be ignored when playing F.E.A.R 2( Although the stories would fit it well for most parts).
Along came February 10 2009 and F.E.A.R 2 is released. Lots of people ( including me ) had some initial sound problems. I merely installed the new version of DX9 and it work 100% but I know some people had to wait for the patch that was released about 2 weeks later. Although the launch version was not really Hard on the Hard setting they increased the difficulty with the same patch that fixed the sound problem. I recommend that if you have the game, or want to buy it, to patch it before playing it, the game is much better when it is a little harder.
…………..and finally we get to the actual game. It’s simple, the game rocks. The game starts a couple of minutes before the explosion in the first one. Which means that you get to see and updated nuke that obviously looks better than the one in the first game ( That I thought also looked remarkable ). You are not the point man anymore ( the guy in the first game ). Instead you play as Michael Becket a Delta Force operator. In the first level you don’t have slow-mo but quickly acquire it, how that happens you are going to have to find out for yourself.
The game has amazing graphics and level design. Nothing beats a slow-mo grenade exploding right underneath the enemy ;) But what surprised me the most is the load time which is virtually non existing. I am serious it loads ridiculously fast. I have a 9800 GTX and I played it on full graphics with no problems. I hooked the game up to my 47” HDTV ( which I do with allot of pc games these days, in fact I am on the 47” right now ;) ) and it looked amazing. The slow-mo effect looks marvelous as expected. The AI is excellent, I heard some people bitching that it is not as good as the first one but I enjoyed it all the way. What is like about Monolith is the detail of their levels. When you see a corpse you can actually see how he died by observing the surroundings. Also everywhere you look you see something “bizarre” happen like someone being forced through a hole a little bigger than my foot. This gets me to another point, this is a violent game and if you don’t like violent games you won’t like this game. The dialog is funny as hell and the story go’s much deeper than the first one. Sometimes you feel like the bastards deserves Alma’s killing spree after what they did to her. F.E.A.R has always had a unique game play. Sure there are other games that also have slow-mo but F.E.A.R just feels different. Dodging bullets has never been this fun. They have re-designed the grenades, you can now hold the grenade in your hand for a while to make the delay before it explodes shorter. This comes in very useful ( and it is fun as hell ) when done correctly. It is also worth it to mention that grenades doesn’t explode on impact with the enemy anymore. This was disappointing at first but it inspires you to try the new delay system that works just as well. The guns are just as awesome as the originals and we see a return of some of them and actually a gun from Perseus Mandate. A metacritic of 79% ( at the time of writing ) is a joke.
Anybody that gave this game less than 80% can’t be called a reviewer, in fact 90% is more the kind of score this game deserves.
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