A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. 2: Operation Rant

ZOMG Spoilers.

Well it's Wednesday night, there is nothing to watch on the television at the moment, and my computer is giving me crap whenever I try to run a game; time to bitch about the FEAR series. There's going to be a lot of negative accentuating coming up so let's first look at why I liked the original FEAR game.

Several first person shooters (eg FEAR, Half Life, Prey) go for the total immersion style where you the player are made to feel like you are the actual character, as opposed to some disconnected presence controlling the illusion of a body. This is achieved with several techniques, most noticeably by locking the player in first person view with no cutscenes. You see only what the avatar sees, get disoriented by explosions, and panic when things get right up in your face. In FEAR not only are you always in first person (except for one jarring but minor cutscene), but you have a body of sorts. Your shadow is a constant presence, if you look down your feet are right there and so forth. When I first played FEAR, this was the first time I encountered such concepts, so I was rather wowed.

Now I've just noticed that I've already written a rather large paragraph on one facet of the positive part of this post (which is supposed to be fairly short) so I'm going to force myself to be brief and not go into unimportant details. So, other good elements of FEAR:
-Horror segments;
-Fairly advanced AI;
-Friendly NPCs aren't too irritating;
-Satisfying difficultly level;
-Adequate pacing and introduction of new events/enemies to prevent a grind.

This all said, now I'm going to say what's wrong with these points:
-Constant first person: you know I can't think of anything particularly bad about this so let's move along;
-Horror segments: while there are some rather clever illusions scattered throughout the game, most are either fairly mild (such as seeing young Alma watching you gets old when you realise she's not going to do anything) or dependent on a sudden shock (such as a corpse falling from an above railing). Also, the middle act of the game (also the largest and most tedious part) has very little of these segments;
-Fairly advanced AI: the enemy soldiers can dive through windows and over obstacles. While this is all well and good, they seem to do it in the middle of firefights for the sheer hell of it;
-Satisfying difficulty level: normally I wouldn't think to mention this but FEAR 2 gives me reason to do so;
-Pacing: okay, I'll admit there are some tedious parts where you mow do half a dozen Replica soldiers, go through a few empty rooms and then face some more Replica soldiers, but as with the difficulty above, FEAR 2 warrants that I mention it.

Jeez, look at me prattle on.

Extraction Point time. As an uninspired expansion pack EP doesn't add anything particularly imaginative. The locations are a creepy but irrelevant church, some creepy warehouses, creepy subways, and a creepy hospital. New enemies consist of a goofy looking supernatural monster and an unnecessary new type of mech. The horror setpieces are all the sudden scare type, and none of the more atmospheric subtle scares (although Holiday's death scene is a type of its own: campy). The one decent part of EP is the Alma split personality subplot with young Alma on your side and old Alma on Paxton's. While interesting, it isn't explained in the least bit, has little bearing on the story or gameplay, and resolves itself in the end anyway.

As I said in the last post, I haven't played Perseus Mandate, but I assume its of the same level of quality as EP. I make this audacious statement on the basis that if there was anything particularly awesome or imaginative in PM, I would have heard about it whilst browsering the web.

So we finally get to FEAR 2, and once again I'm going to leave it for another post. What was initially planned to be a short introduction into the type of thing I'd talk (write, type, whatever) about on this blog has turned into a 3 post monster, which is still quite summarised.

To be concluded. Hopefully.

A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.

Manually doing captions for pictures is going to get tedious...

Several weeks ago FEAR 2 Project Origin was released, continuing the first person shooter franchise started with FEAR. I had some fondness for the first one and plenty of dislike for the expansion packs. This in mind I felt rather ambivalent about the sequel, as although my natural cynicism said it would be bad to mediocre, I hoped that perhaps Monolith had taken what they learned from the earlier games and used it to refine the elements of the series I liked.

Then I played FEAR 2. And died a little inside.

Conveniently I've become accustomed to this sort of disappointment, so rather than feel angry and betrayed, I'm just a little sad.
Before I get into the details, let's have some quick background (enough so people who will be bored, and people who don't won't have a clear picture).

There have been four games in the franchise. FEAR, FEAR Extraction Point, FEAR Perseus Mandate, and FEAR 2: Project Origin. Now FEAR and FEAR 2 were made by Monolith, whereas Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate were made TimeGate, due to the fun of developer/publisher disagreements.
In FEAR you play as the silent Point Man of First Encounter Assault Recon, who has a mysterious past and the capability to see the world in bullet time. The scarce members of FEAR and a lot of Delta Force red shirts face off against a battalion of clone super soldiers psychically controlled by Paxton Fettel, who is searching for his mother Alma (think Samara from The Ring except with fire instead of water, and she kills a little more directly). People die, perception is screwed with, Alma turns out to be your mother, and you try to kill everyone with a nuclear explosion. Fun times all round.
Extraction Point follows right after the events of FEAR, and the midden has really hit the windmill; everything you did in the last game has either been undone (killing Paxton), or made things worse (nuclear explosion kills everyone except the target). Following this pleasant turn of events the FEAR team members spend the entire game trying to get the hell out the city and proceed to fail utterly.
Now I haven't played Perseus Mandate, but you are not missing much. Don't worry, my upcoming rant will elaborate.
FEAR 2 has you playing as Michael Becket of the Delta Force (the same guys who spent the previous games dying as much as.....things that die a lot). After getting bullet time you go from one secret Armacham base another for the majority of the game as you search for a clue, and then a psychic amplifier. In the end you try to kill Alma but instead you just get raped.

Literally.

Well that was the 'quick' background, now time for the actual rant. Except that at this point I'm not in the mood anymore to complain so I guess the point for this post will be a post in itself. Ironically enough (or perhaps intentionally) this sort of inconclusive and abrupt ending right up the collective alleys of the FEAR games.

To be continued.