I have to admit that when I first picked up F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin I was looking forward to being scared to death by the finesse of a fine Japanese horror film. Instead, I felt bludgeoned over the head by something with all the finesse of a tank (but then again, perhaps all the women I have ever dated were right, and the problem really does lay with me.) You see F.E.A.R. 2 may not have been the game I wanted it to be, but it can still be something great. It really just depends on what you are willing to overlook, and what you won’t budge on.

This time around your character is given a name and rank, as you’re dropped into the body of Michael Becket, a Delta Force sergeant on a mission to arrest Genvieve Aristide. You may remember Aristide from the conversations you overheard at the start and end of the first F.E.A.R. game and as you have also probably guessed, the storylines of F.E.A.R. 1 and 2 overlap at points. For example, this game begins right where F.E.A.R. 1 left off. At the end of the first game you caused a building to explode, and that same explosion is experienced at the start of F.E.A.R. 2. This time however it knocks you unconscious, but do not F.E.A.R. (yes I made a pun); because you’ll soon get back up, and as an added bonus, all of your powers from the first game will have been returned to you. It doesn’t make much sense at that point I know, but why are you complaining? You now have all the skills you need to fulfill your life-long dream of being a Ghostbuster. Things are looking up for you.

So by now you’ve probably guessed that I really did enjoy this game, and to make things better it only left me with a few small gripes. My biggest would be how F.E.A.R. 2 tried to scare me. The subtle Japanese mind unravelling was unfortunately replaced by the more North American style of startling monsters that jump out of closets or the dark corners of a room. At points this game gave me flashbacks Doom 3, and you’d think that would be a good thing, but the problem with games like these is that they can easily become predictable. It really does not take that long to catalogue what objects the monsters can jump out of, and thus the startles can become the stuff of B-Movies as you can successful predict what object the monsters will jump out of next.

Although you must take the good with the bad I guess. Sure the scaring no longer feels like an art form, but if you can look past that you will see that the environments in this game are more than enough to make up for anything predictable. In the original F.E.A.R. you spent the whole game fighting the same 3 bad guys over and over again throughout the same warehouse for hours on end. F.E.A.R. 2 however brings a far greater selection of both maps and enemy AI to the table. There is an elementary school full of ghosts, destroyed city streets populated by ashed corpses, secret government laboratories full of mutants, and that only names a few. Add in a far more diverse selection of opponents to “ventilate” with you gun, and you’ve created a game that feels far more like the real world than its predecessor ever did(and that was my biggest problem with the original F.E.A.R.)

The soundtrack and sound effects are just as amazing as ever, and they really do create an extremely scary atmosphere. If you didn’t know, I work with sound on a daily basis, so I know the affect that certain sounds can have on a person; but I was still truly amazed to see how much of this game’s experience is created with sound alone. To prove this to myself I turned off every piece of audio (except for the voices of the characters); I then proceeded to play the game this way for a few hours, and I found the game to be almost comedic without the rest of the audio creating atmosphere. All I ever heard was one cheesy death cry after another as the enemy clones tossed themselves into the path of my bullets.

Bonus points also need to be given to Monolith Productions, and Warner Brothers Entertainment for assembling an amazing voice cast that includes the omni-talented Cortana from the Halo games (the people at Monolith do know how to pick them).

At this point I F.E.A.R. (yeah I punned again) that this whole article is becoming some sort of F.E.A.R. love fest, but I really can’t come up with anything that bad to say about this game. The only bones of contention I have are the choice of scare tactics(like I mentioned above), and the controls.

The controls bugged me because they just felt too loose. I also found that my character had a tendency to sway left and right for no reason at all. Because of this (and on more than one occasion) I found my character drunkingly grinding against the walls of a hallway like he had knocked back one too many beers before coming into work that morning. While playing the single player campaign I didn’t find it to be that much of a problem because it’s pretty easy to turn on Bullet-Time, and just take out an entire room of clones while standing still. It was a little different in multiplayer when everyone is running around so rapidly that I found it hard to keep up sometimes. Although even in multiplayer it felt like a barely noticeable annoyance.

And like I just mentioned the Matrix style bullet-time makes its triumphant return in this game, and to be honest I missed it. However, if you can’t stand it, you do have the option to turn it off for the whole game.

The multiplayer in this game is ok, but I found it to be out of place. This game is all about a creepy little girl trying to scare you to death. The multiplayer however is just a standard assortment of team battles and objective games that could just as easily have been counter strike. You can certainly have fun playing it, but it just felt completely tacked on, and out of place in this game.

In the end, F.E.A.R. 2 is not the F.E.A.R. game we remembered or were looking forward too. It drops the finesse of the first game to beat you over the head with scares that primarily come in the form of monsters jumping out of closets. However, it improved so much on everything else that I have no problem overlooking the choice of scare tactics. That being said, I would suggest that you only rent this game (if you are old enough and can handle being scared). The campaign is good (“scary good” as Rick Jeanneret would say), but I do not feel that it offers much in the way of replayability. On top of that the multiplayer feels too out of place and generic for this game, and I honestly would have had more fun playing HALO  again. So, if you think you can finish off the single player campaign in a week or two than I highly suggest renting it, enjoy it, beating the game, and moving on.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.