F.E.A.R. is the latest of a very long line of first person shooters to appear on the 360, so can it do anything even remotely different from the others and make my day?
F.E.A.R. stands for First Encounter Assault Recon (or something – make up your own amusing acronym and send it the email address below) and you’re a superdooper cop-soldier with a very special ability. We won’t be too critical of the fact that this amazing ability is basically Max Payne’s 6 year old Bullet Time™, because here it’s implemented so well, and really adds to the gameplay. Just like good old Max you can use your slo-mo ability all the time and have a limited amount. When triggered it slows the action down so that you can literally dodge bullets and rockets, Matrix-style, and obviously have a tremendous edge on your enemies as far as speed goes too. You’ll often be able to trigger slo-mo, run around and flank a couple of enemies and shoot, punch or kick three shades of crap out of them before they even knew you were there – very cool indeed.
A bizarre plot that has some paramilitary force infiltrating a multi-billion dollar aerospace compound, taking hostages bla bla, an evil doctor breeding mutant bla bla to make an invincible army of bla bla bla in order to yadda yadda – y’know the idea. Safe to say it has lots of pointless sub plot elements as you can listen to lots of different answer phones which don’t appear to add anything to the game – at least Doom 3’s similar plot idea led you to armour or weapons. The story does however have some terrifying moments – possibly because I’m terrified of little girls - but the plot is quite clever and has an ending that was unexpected and refreshingly different.
Yes, I said shoot, punch or kick! – Amazingly here’s yet another first person shooter sensible enough to follow Riddick’s lead and give you a decent hand-to-hand combat ability to back up all the game’s neat weapons, and it works pretty well. Melee attack is set to ‘B’ and in its basic form is a normal punch, but if you jump and press ‘B’ you get a powerful, jaw-crunching roundhouse kick, or move and attack and you’ll get a jump kick - pull down and you’ll get a shin-splitting sliding tackle. These all work fine at normal speed, but look way better if done during slo-mo, F.E.A.R.’s physics and ragdoll effects really start to shine during these moments as you kick an enemy around one of the many offices, scattering the desk’s paraphernalia all over.
As well as kicking ass you obviously get to shoot some as well, and F.E.A.R. has some cool weapons that allow you to splatter some nice blood effects around – you can dual-wield some of them and there’s a nice variation between small arms and heavy weapons way too powerful for the restricted spaces in which you fight. A terrible machine gun/sniper rifle (possibly the worst sniper weapon I’ve ever used) is made up for by a lovely Particle weapon that has a zoom mode – this instantly fries any human enemy it hits reducing them to smouldering bones – nice. My other favourite weapon is called the ‘Penetrator’ – initially unimpressive with its smallish magazine you soon realize that it actually nails enemies to the wall – again, this is a nice, if disappointingly bloodless touch – machine guns produce plenty of gore, but a nail through the helmet? (and that's got to hurt!) – nope, not a drip of blood. You also get a selection of grenades and remote mines – all of which come in handy along the way.
F.E.A.R. has a decent enough multiplayer mode too, and happily the slo-mo ability from the campaign mode is present and correct. It works in a similar way to Far Cry Instincts’ Predator mode, in which you can pick up the slo-mo power up and trigger it when you want, but you immediately become a marked man and your position can be seen by everyone else in the game, so your slo-mo ability may give you a distinct advantage, but they should be able to see you coming. It lends an interesting tactical edge to what might have otherwise been just another deathmatch game. Again a nice surprise, all the detail, physics and damage to scenery is also a feature of the multiplayer game – and shootouts can be a thrilling hail of bullets, flames, dust, debris and blood. There’s also a feature I haven’t seen in a multiplayer console game before - the spectator mode allows you to not only follow a particular player, but also control the camera completely freely and zoom around and explore the map as you wish.
You get the expected set of options (ranked or quick match, custom match, create match, elimination, slo-mo deathmatch slo-mo CTF, team deathmatch team elimination, leaderboards etc). The 10 complex but compact maps allow for some hectic and action-packed fragging, and it plays well enough that it even managed to keep me away from Gears of War for a while.
No 360 game can get by without decent looks and F.E.A.R. kind of loses the plot here – it looks strictly last-gen until the bullets start to fly. At this point wonderful Havok physics kick into action, and added to its own plastered on, but top-notch visual effects, a game that looks like it could run happily on the PS2 suddenly becomes one that continuously makes you go “wow!” – at least till the novelty wears off – it’s not quite the one-trick pony that Max Payne was, but with its nightmare sequences, psychological mind terrors and general scare tactics, it comes across like some kind of hybrid of Max Payne, Deus Ex and Monolith’s very own Condemned. When you boil it all down it’s not quite as good as any of them. F.E.A.R.’s linear levels and mostly confined interiors (including too many identical offices by far) never allow it to feel like any more than a good, but low budget and small scale sci-fi schlock-horror, and its biggest problem is that there are a few genuine blockbusters around at the moment.
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