F.E.A.R.'s claim to fame in the PC gaming world is based around bringing a paranormal element to first person shooting and closely integrating this element with the first person shooter style. With F.E.A.R., graphics effects like soft shadows, pixel shaders and crystal clear sound effects are essential to the bringing this paranormal element to life. Read the full review after the jump.
F.E.A.R. is the best looking and best sounding game on the fps market at the moment. There are graphical elements which other games beat (I've seen more detailed gun models by modders) but it's the combination of the collective technology used here that makes the overall visual experience of playing F.E.A.R. so brilliant. Other titles may look better in screenshots, but nothing I've played touches F.E.A.R. when it comes to mind boggling visual cinematics. Whilst it may not be bringing any major innovations to the board, it does push the boundary of the first person shooter into a whole new cinematic level.
Obviously looks are very important to first person shooters (they were one of the main reasons I purchased this game) and F.E.A.R. is no exception. The entirely new engine created for F.E.A.R. is very impressive visually, but the surprising thing is that you don't notice it much. In F.E.A.R. you're far too worried about what's around the next corner than looking at the excellent soft shadows. It's this console like integration of the graphics that I like about F.E.A.R. After the first few levels I had little interest in tweaking the settings to get the best possible performance out of my rig. Once you've found the sweet spot between graphics and performance you'll just get down to playing the game. There's no urge to tweak this or that just so you can see x/y/z monster in extra high detail. Maybe it's the game's lower reliance on textures to create eye candy. Instead the game features a higher amount of pixel shader effects that make textures less important. So while the graphical effects are top quality (from the ripple effect that grenades make to the smoke/sparks/fireballs that bullets make) they're not distracting from the game - which is a good thing when you're involved in a tense battle. If you're looking for a tech demo, this ain't your game.
Unfortunately the graphics in F.E.A.R. are very hard to capture in a screenshot. The one featured below doesn't show any of the pixel shader, soft shadow or lighting effects that are featured throughout the game. You really need to see this game in-motion to appreciate it. Hint: download the demo and see for yourself.
Sound is F.E.A.R.'s strongest aspect. Unfortunately without lugging my JBL Creatures, PC and Monitor round to your
house I cannot physically demonstrate to you how good the sound is. In F.E.A.R. you nearly detect more enemies by sound
than by vision. Like other games, your footstep's sound changes depending on the surface on which you're standing.
Unlike other games, the sound of your own footsteps can scare the s**t out of you, especially if you're in a tense
scene. It's a sign of how inspired the sound engineers were that you can be freaked out by your own character's effects
on the game environment. Every single sound is well thought out, superbly encoded (no distortion) and adds buckets to
your involvement in battles, flashbacks and cutscenes. If I had a choice between turning up the sound quality and the
graphics, I'd go for sound all the way.
An essential part of the feel of the game is the slow-mo feature. There are good and bad sides to the slow-mo. The
good: it's a nice bit of eye candy (all the pixel shaders effects like the ripple effect made by grenades look even
more awesome in slow mo than they do in "normal time"), it helps you out in close call situations. The bad: I'm not
sure it's an entirely necessary feature. I can only think of maybe 7-8 situations in the entire game where I actually
needed slow-mo. Sure, in those situations I really really did need slow-mo, but they only accounted for 5-10% of the
game.
Besides slow-mo breaking up the flow, there's little to fault here. The weapons feel brilliant to fire and reload and
none of them get boring or are made obsolete by any of the weapons you get later on. In fact I found the rocket
launcher less interesting than the weaker weapons like the "John Woo" style handguns. Of course these won't make a dent
in some of the larger enemies you encounter later on.
The story is one of the biggest let-downs in F.E.A.R. The amazing quality of the gunfights really overshadows the weak
script. I was generally uninterested in the whole "clone escapes, kills people, go kill clone" premise of the story. In
particular one part of the way the story is presented annoyed me: answering machines. These little machines contain
glimpses at "ghostly" employees of facilities, offices and warehouses you're placed at, through the recorded messages
of loved ones/bosses/friends. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) you can skip them (just walk past and don't press play),
but as they're a good portion of the entire plot and feel of the game it's hard to understand why they were ever used
in the first place. There really aren't a lot of cut-scenes, which makes the answering machine idea feel like a
cop-out. Another way in which the script tries to get you immersed in the story is through several "flash-forward"
cut-scenes where your vision is blurred and your character experiences a paranormal experience. Whilst they're
definitely eye candy, hearing some guy with blood all over his face drawl on with a monologue isn't very compelling. I
feel that the story is what you could consider a game version of the Grudge. The story is really only there to justify
the scare 'em up style of the game. I mean, there had to be some form of reason behind the whole paranormal theme,
right?
The multiplayer section of F.E.A.R. is a fun little romp for a while (we're talking 4-5 hours till you get bored) but
is missing the polish of the rest of the game. If the developers had implemented some form of squad based game-type (or
even *fingers crossed* a co-op mode) then I expect this would be a more compelling part of the game. Unfortunately the
MP mode of F.E.A.R. has some flat, uninteresting maps put together with some generic fps gametypes (deathmatch, team
deathmatch, CTF). Avoid.
Accessibility here is purely a matter of asking a question: have you played a first person shooter before and did you
like it? If the answer is yes, then you won't have a problem with this game. The controls aren't overly complex, the
graphics just work and you don't really need that powerful a PC to play the game.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed F.E.A.R.. It was very hard to put the game down until I had got through to the next
level and then after that, the next one. It's extremely impressive to see how far game creation technology has come:
F.E.A.R. is visually and audibly closer to thriller movies like the Grudge than it is to retro first person shooters.
The cinematic battle scenes are totally mind blowing the first time you pick up the game and they don't get any less
fun - thanks to the excellent AI. The most important parts of a brilliant first person shooter are all here: brilliant
graphics, top-of-the-class sound, groundbreaking particle physics, advanced AI and perfect gun models.
Unfortunately it's the little inadequacies that prevent F.E.A.R. from becoming a genre defining game. The storyline
really does feel irrelevant at times and the answering machine storytelling device just makes it feel rushed. The lack
of a decent multiplayer means I haven't picked up the game since I completed it. In a sentence: F.E.A.R. is a
technically outstanding first person shooter which is let down by a lackluster plot and poor multiplayer
experience.
Score
Overall Score: 85/100
