[Game Review] F.E.A.R.

 

For the sake of my own sanity, I will be writing F.E.A.R. as FEAR, so sorry if you're the kind of person who has issues with incorrect formatting.

 

FEAR came about as a combination of things going on in 2005.  Three years after The Ring proved to be a surprise hit, and a year after Half-Life 2 blew away critics (and The Grudge proved that The Ring wasn't a fluke, but rather a rising fad), various unconnected parts of the social consciousness were threading together at Monolith Productions.  Monolith, up to this point, had been most notable for developing the cult shooter Blood, but between then and 2005 they had mostly toiled in obscurity with a few notable outliers, such as No One Lives Forever, a spy-shooter well liked at the time, and Aliens Vs Predator 2, the sequel to the acclaimed PC shooter.  With the move into the HD era of gaming (and the 7th generation of consoles, though FEAR would have to wait another year for a port), it was time to step things up a notch, as many other studios tried to do at the time.  

2005 turned out to be a busy year for Monolith, releasing the relatively well liked The Matrix Online, the criminally underappreciated cult game Condemned: Criminal Origins as a launch title for the Xbox 360, and FEAR as their benchmark-worthy graphical powerhouse for PC, all within a span of nine months.  While Condemned at the very least deserves its own review eventually, FEAR stood out from the crowd for a number of reasons.  Firstly, and most obviously, was its premise.  

In FEAR, you play as Point Man, a nameless, silent protagonist who is a part of the secret military agency called First Encounter Assault Recon, or F.E.A.R. for short (one of the dumbest backronyms in gaming, but let's not dwell on it).  A man named Paxton Fettel is running amok around facilities owned by the ATC corporation, and he seems to have a telepathic link to an army of clone soldiers.  You're tasked with trying to hunt him down, learning what ATC was up to in the process and repeatedly encountering a little ghost girl named Alma.  That latter bit, in particular, was a major selling point for the game.  The general plot is more than a little ridiculous, giving just enough reason for some of the more fantastical elements of the story, but likewise explaining too much to be effective in what the game is trying to sell itself as: a horror game.  

FEAR was the shooter with the creepy little girl in it, the horror game that somehow (according to popular opinion) managed to be scary and let you shoot the hell out of everything in sight.  There had been horror shooters before - hell, the shooter genre got its biggest boons from Doom and Quake, games with plenty of horror DNA - but they had rarely integrated the horror elements so sincerely.  Rarely is the key word there, because FEAR is more a collection of influences than it is an original work.  FEAR, as far as gameplay and setting goes, is an odd hybrid between the horror and dark environments of Doom 3, the level design and general banality of Half-Life, and bullet time gimmick from Max Payne.  The three styles blend together surprisingly well, with the darkness and eerie atmosphere of Doom 3 draping nicely over the offices and industrial environments right out of Half-Life.  To say that FEAR is scary, though, is a bit of an overstatement.  It's eerie, most of all, and though the game attempts a few jump scares or unsettling moments, most of them play off as corny in this day and age.  Creepy little girls are cliche, cryptic talking corpses that pass by windows and dissipate into a dust feel like standard creepy game fare, and really the only thing left in the horror toolbox happens to be one of the game's strongest assets: its sound design.  

FEAR was noted for its sound design then, and, though it has dated somewhat compared to how ridiculously good modern shooters have gotten at getting guns to give off a walloping bang, still feels impressive today.  The atmospheric soundtrack does well to indicate when things aren't right without overloading you with information.  One of the greatest assets any work of multimedia horror has is in utilizing silence, and FEAR understands that a lot more than it doesn't.  When you are running around an abandoned office building at night and the loudest thing you can hear is your own footsteps, the game is working a little bit of magic.  Industrial sounds will squeal and hum at appropriate moments, and, most notably, the staticy yelping of enemies doesn't just let you know that they are around the next corner, but will often give you some of your few jump scares in the game, whether intentional or not.  

That staticy talk is part of what is probably the most acclaimed aspect of FEAR.  FEAR, upon release and to this day (to some degree), has incredible AI.  Enemies will call out to one another about your whereabouts, whether your flanking or have somehow slipped away from their sight.  They will call out grenades being lobbed their way, or whether they need backup.  These call outs aren't just for maneuvering and understanding the battlefield however, often times lobbing insults at one another when a command is barked at them that they don't like.  There is a layer of humanity to them, and of desperately trying to out think you at all times (something sort of funny considering they are telepathically linked clone soldiers, but like I said the story is sort of silly).  The AI is the cleverest I can think of from the era, feeling far more the descendant of the original Halo's AI than any of that series' sequels.  More than once I had my reticle at an enemies head and the first thing he does is duck, giving him the opportunity to get in a few shots before a blast from a shotgun turns him into a red mist.  It is the small touches that really make it feel like you should be on your toes.  One of the bigger touches, however, is in their incredible aim. 

As far as difficulty in games go, one of the invisible sliders being adjusted is enemy accuracy.  In FEAR, that slider is surprisingly high even on low difficulties, and the reason for that is to balance with the bullet time effect.  Being able to slow down time becomes an essential part of your arsenal throughout FEAR.  This isn't something original to FEAR, as Max Payne likewise had high damage and incredible accuracy from enemy fire, but FEAR's improved shooter mechanics make the ability sing.  Shooting in FEAR just feels really good.  It has dated some nowadays with our Titanfalls and modern Counter Strikes, but at the time it was cream of the crop.  Maneuvering around corners is made easier with the lean ability (although, admittedly, I hardly used it, opting for bullet time running out of cover instead), and all the guns feel satisfying to use (except perhaps that weird phaser sniper, which never didn't feel a bit like a Nerf gun).  FEAR's dirty little secret is that, underneath the somewhat unique veneer it was marketed with, there is an actually good and tight shooter here.  

FEAR's main issue is in part timing, and part that it really wasn't innovating so much as taking the next step up the ladder.  It did what the big guys did before but with a bit more polish, and a bit of style.  As a series, FEAR fared notoriously poorly, with the generally lesser FEAR 2: Project Origin bringing the gunplay but faltering on the horror in a disappointing way, and FEAR 3 (stylized stupidly as F3AR) was so obviously released under pressure (and by a different studio at that, while Monolith was forced to toil for Warner Bros. Interactive on the immediatley failing Gotham City Imposters and the MOBA copycat Guardians of Middle Earth), clocking in at roughly 4 hours of shoddily made game time.  FEAR's peak seemed to be here, in the first release, doomed to the life of a cult game, much like most of everything Monolith made around this time.  There's nothing wrong with that, and FEAR still has a seat in the video game cannon, defining the high-end PC specs of the mid 00s and bringing together a lot of elements from the previous years that would carry on in the likes of Bioshock and pretty well any shooter after it.  It was an industry benchmark for awhile, and though it lead to a trend picked up by some pretty poor games (Alone in the Dark (2008) and The Darkness come to mind), what it would be remembered for was its solid gameplay and its attempt at a hybrid that, as of now, looks not to be the fashion for quite some time.  FEAR stands as a unique shooter experience in an ocean of samey, brown military cock measuring contests.  It may not ultimately blow you out of the water, but it will feel rather fresh nonetheless.

 

 

 

8.5