You know you’re onto a great game when you awaken from a trance-like state after an indeterminable number of hours gaming only to look down at your notepad and realise you’ve been having far too much fun to actually make any notes what so ever. F.E.A.R: Perseus Mandate is not that game; I had 2 pages of criticism before I’d finished the first interval.

Don’t get me wrong, making games is hard work but when you’ve got a game engine that has already produced a very special game indeed in the form of the original FEAR (yes that was a punctuationectomy) and a reasonable expansion pack, namely Extraction Point, there isn’t that much that can go wrong. Is there? Oh, you want me to tell you that.

The engine itself has not aged well, the original game did long grey corridors very well indeed but even these got a little tiresome by the end-game. I have to admit by the time I’d finished it I had no inclination to play any more FEAR and even the freely downloadable release of a multiplayer component (FEAR: Combat) couldn’t excite me enough to go back. I didn’t play Extraction Point at all, but I can extrapolate a line of best fit between the two games I have played that would put it somewhere in the region of, well… grey.

The gunplay is where FEAR excelled and in that respect Perseus Mandate has thankfully somewhat redeemed itself. The slow motion “bullet time” goodness is still there to aid you in the tricky gun fights and the weapons feel like they really are doing mortal damage to line after line of identikit bad guys. That is until you meet the bad guys who take a million bullets to bring down and simply stand and absorb fire while displaying no ill effects. In fact I got so bored part way through I stopped and compiled a list of the most annoying types of enemy to fight. Do you want to hear it? No? Well tough...

Invisible bad guys.
Bad guys who attack you from nowhere without warning.
Bad guys who don’t even recoil when shot point blank with a shotgun.
Bad guys who you have to spend a whole level running from as they are immune to the weapons you currently have.
Bad guys who look very much the same as the last bad guy.

You may be able to guess that all of these feature heavily in FEAR:PM. However, some credit has to be given to the laser carbine assault rifle which pretty much single-handedly saved the game from being shelved half way through. I’ve always wanted a gun like this and in this game it is in its element. Open the in game chat with the T key and type ammo to give yourself full ammo when you have this gun. You’ll thank me when you’re having fun. It’s just a shame the gun has to be... you guessed it, grey.

You’ll notice I’ve skipped over any mention of the multiplayer here, or the story. If you are buying this for either of these then you may want to pop into a hospital and have your head examined. The multiplayer is available for free as I mentioned earlier and the story involves something happening somewhere grey. You find about it by listening to answer-phone messages. Again.

If you played and enjoyed the original FEAR then don’t play this it’ll leave your happy nostalgia in tatters, if you’ve not played FEAR then go and play that instead, I’m almost certain it features less grey...