Buzzin Games

I should probably come clean here and say I don’t really get what everyone saw in the original F.E.A.R. – released in 2005. It was certainly a decent corridor shooter with some nicely used horror elements, but as soon as you realised that the scenery was barely going to change and got bored of the bullet time mechanic and samey enemies… well, I can’t understand why it got such major praise.

But there’s some good news for F.E.A.R 2 – there’s certainly a lot more variety here, but on the negative side, the world of first person shooters has moved forward a long way and makes the game look somewhat dated. It’s still a competent shooter, and if you’ve never played one before you’ll likely think it’s amongst the best games ever made, but everyone else will suffer several moments of déjà vu as they work their way through the game’s 14 levels.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t an enjoyable game, it’s just that it’s made no effort to innovate.

The Xbox 360 platform is absolutely packed with FPS (first person shooter) games – off the top of my head: The Orange Box, Halo 3, Rainbow Six 1 and 2, the original F.E.A.R, The Darkness, Turok, Turning Point, Unreal Tournament, Perfect Dark, Frontlines, Medal of Honour, Shadow Run, Time Shift, Call of Duty 2-5, Battlefield, Ghost Recon, the original F.E.A.R… and many more I’ve forgotten – and there’s not a great deal to make F.E.A.R 2 stand out.

In fact, if you were to make a check-list of tried-and-tested FPS elements, you’d be able to tick most of them off well before the final chapter closes on the cliff-hanger ending: health packs – check, bullet time – check, gun turret battles – check, mech suit – check, providing sniper cover for a team-mate – check, moving platform segments – check, collecting diary elements to fill in the piecemeal story – check, check, check-aroo.

These elements are tried and tested for a reason – they work well with the genre. It can be linear as anything (and this most definitely is), but as long as the basic mechanics work, then you can be happy and F.E.A.R 2 accomplishes this. It’s also got some rather superb levels later on, too. The school based one just over half way through is particularly memorable, and fits well with the horror motif it attempts to establish as the game goes along.

I say attempts, because it seems to drift in and out, as if the developers couldn’t quite decide whether they were trying to make Silent Hill or Rainbow Six.

The result is a computer game that never really provides shocks in the same way the original did, and frequently resorts to tactics which have really lost their shock value – movement caught off screen, psychological episodes where the scenery completely changes temporarily and a frustrating lack of good lighting.

In fact, this particular method of establishing a mood seems fundamentally broken – it (like many other games) tries to suggest a perfect brightness setting to keep the atmosphere, but it’s too damned dark to see anything at some points and actually holds up progress as you use the ineffective flashlight to try and take the route you should be taking. Worse still, you break the atmosphere by turning up the brightness to a level where the route is actually clear.

This may all sound overly negative, so I should re-balance it a bit. The gun play works very well, with the ability to topple tables to create cover if you can’t find any around. The weapons feel suitably meaty, and the opposition A.I is pretty much spot on, as enemies are quick to spot you, shout orders, create cover for themselves and play tactically around you, which plays in very well with the wonderfully atmospheric audio.

It looks very nice too, and the greater variety of the scenery does a good job in showing the power of Monolith’s engine. When you activate the slow-mo effect, you can see bullets whizzing past your head, creating a sense of tension that feels lacking at times thanks to facing the same cloned soldiers over and over again. The plot (an outlandish horror-sci fi romp about a little girl trapped against her will with the power to control things with her mind – if you didn’t play the first game you will be more than a little lost) explains this well enough, but when there’s a list of enemy types you could easily count on two hands, it’s pretty hard to keep any sense of tension around proceedings.

In terms of multiplayer, the game is actually very well served, though again there’s not a great deal here to draw you from the Xbox’s other multiplayer delights.

There are a total of six modes, ranging from the usual straightforward death matches to team based games of flag capturing and other hijinx. It incorporates the ability to gain experience as you play, like in Call of Duty 4, but with every game requiring this kind of time sync to improve your character, there’s a real danger of putting people off of your game.

That said the multiplayer maps are all well designed and create a good sense of action, and the developer is releasing a free ‘toy soldiers’ map pack (based on shrunken players in everyday environments) which promise to make it even better. As ever, multiplayer will live or die depending on how popular it remains.

Finding a game at the moment is pretty easy, but will it be five months from now? Time will tell.

So, F.E.A.R 2 is a good game, rather than a great one. It’s a solid first person shooter which will provide a few scares and a convoluted storyline, set against some of the best gun play imaginable. Just be aware that if you’ve played more than a handful of shooters in the last few years, nothing the game provides will feel new, inventive or unfamiliar in the slightest.

If you’re aware of that and go in with expectations suitably muted, you’ll find F.E.A.R 2 passes an enjoyable 10-12 hours… it’s just that Monolith have brought us some fantastically memorable games in the past – including Alien vs Predator 2, No One Lives Forever and Condemned – and F.E.A.R 2 all feels a bit ‘by the numbers’. That’s a shame given the developer’s pedigree. As it stands it feels a bit lost in the Xbox’s FPS line up – far from the worst, but a way short of the best. Hopefully they can raise the bar with F.E.A.R 3…

7/10