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Warning: Loooooooong review is longer than longcat.

F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin

Legacy:

There are some games that start off new genres. Other games define genres or combine them to become something new. And then you have the kind of games that take a genre and turns the familiar into something truly remarkable. F.E.A.R did that, back in the day. It was a game that took your average shooter game and made it truly awesome in turns of action and fire. That alone would have made F.E.A.R a game to be noted mongst it's peers. But it didn't stop there, as most shooter fans would know very well. It introduced a level of terror and fright that most games that had that as it's only feature failed to provide.

For it's day, and even now, the original F.E.A.R game was exceptional in it's delivery and execution of first-person shooting and bonechilling fear. It was simply so well put together that it blew away the minds of almost every gamer that sat down and finished it. To this day, it remains amongst the top five games I've ever played and I think it'll remain there.

Spoilers about the first game follows:

The story was fairly simple. As part of the First Encounter Assault & Recon team, you were sent in to deal with a rather nasty problem. A commander named Paxton Fettel had taken control over a batallion of soldiers and posed a serious threat. The kicker of course, was that Paxton Fettel was actually a fairly powerful psychic who had a telepathic connection to his troops - who were actually cloned soldiers with no real minds of their own - and thus became the ultimate commander in the field. Your mission: Kill Fettel and the troops would go into standby mode.

Of course, as this wasn't enough, the company who created this little... err... problem... had a few other dark secrets. In a truly japanofile way, they'd taken a longhaired little psychic girl and turned her insane. Quite psychotic, to be fair. True, she wasn't entirely stable to begin with, and may or may not have been the purest manifestation of evil since whoever invented DRM was born. This is never fully explored in the game, and it's slightly up to the player to fill in the blanks. The only thing that's certain, is that Alma (the little girl) is more evil than Mizhara and more powerful than Arthas. Bad combination, especially considering that you are somewhat receptive to psychic powers.

The game basically follows you as you slaughter your way through a batallion of Fettel's troops (while Fettel is under the command of Alma) and steals their pants since you keep ******** your own whenever Alma jumps out of the shadows to say peekaboo. The game is scary as hell, and filled with tons of awesome action, all at once. It all ends with you finding out that Alma's actually been dead for quite some time now, and sealed away in a very sciency vault underground for a bit longer than she's been dead. Worse, you're actually related to the *****... apparently.

Anyway, things get nasty, the powers that be goes Umbrella and a nuke goes off. You go flying away in a helicopter and Alma comes out for one last big scare. Basically, awesomeness incarnate. When I'd finished that game, I just sat there for ten minutes enjoying the afterglow before I realised I really needed a cigarette. In short, it was orgasmic in every way.

The so called expansions, I'm not even going to bother talking about since me and Yahtzee agree that they never really existed and were just bad dreams. And now, let's take a look at F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin, and figure out if this one too needs to be written off as something to be shunned.

Story:

You no longer play the lovable elite psycho super uber duper warrior soldier you played in the first game. Now you play another lovable elite psycho super uber duper warrior soldier in a completely different team which doesn't have anything to do with First Encounter Assault & Recon. The sheer amount of elite units in this universe is starting to frighten me a bit, as it's obvious that they are really needed and thus the world must be a far more scary place than I want to think about. You start out slightly before the end of the first game. While the first main character is going through the final stages of dealing with Alma (and failing) you are going in on a milk and cookie run. You are going in to secure and evacuate a delightful little lady who's got something or other to do with the stuff done in the first game. Not going into details, wikipedia it if you haven't played the first game.

Of course, things go tits up as soon as you enter the house when you encounter a fairly huge amount of other elite soldiers coming to kill the woman. In a true elite soldier unit fashion, you of course split up almost immediately to make sure no one snakes the other guys' kills. Oh, forgot to mention. You're already starting to hallucinate and see Alma around. But of course, as an elite soldier you don't bother mentioning the fact that you're going insane and keep doing the lone warrior thing. It's quite cool, but even to me it sounds kind of retarded.

More than this, I'm not really going to explain since it would be a great deal too much of a spoiler.

The story progresses through the ways we're used to by now. You see things unfold around you, and sometimes the camera takes control of things while you just watch the coolness of the "cutscenes" as it were. But only the skeleton parts of the story is told to you straight by the game. The rest you need to find for yourself through exploration and picking up pieces of "intel". This is basically just memory sticks and discs from which you read e-mails and so on. Alot of the story comes from these things, and lead to revelations about the people you deal with during the game. A decent way of doing it, but I always leave a level with a slightly annoyed feeling that I might have missed some of them, and thus missed out on "lore".

There's plenty of places online that list the locations of all the pieces of intel, but I can't be ***** to alt-tab my way out every now and again just to memorize a list of locations I need to find. Completely ruins the pace of the game. So, I'll probably have to cheat my way through a second time and godmode explore just to find all the intel. Speaking of cheats, they are actually disabled in this game. But that I'll cover in the gameplay section. Oh wait... guess what section's next?

Soundtra... Just kidding, Gameplay:

This is where things start to itch. You know, that itch in the back of your head that usually means there's something wrong but you won't quite admit it to yourself? Well, I got that fairly soon after I'd started playing. That's when I realized what it was. The game had been consoleified. The UI, the gameplay... It was all made for consoles. And that just doesn't work well on a PC. There's only one single game in existence that has pulled it off, and that's Mass Effect. And even that suffered from a horrible inventory system. Granted, there's not much of an inventory in F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin. There's mostly just four guns, a few medkits and grenades of various kinds. The problem comes when you're dealing with intel and so on.

Where Mass Effect had a well designed way of browsing the knowledge you found during playing the game, F.E.... oh **** it, PO fails to deliver. The UI is intrusive, clunky, hard to manage on a PC and... well, it just sucks. The icons used when you get close to a door or interactable item are annoying and intrusive and completely ruins the immersion. The menus were designed by someone who should be shot, and it's all fairly annoying to say the least.

But once you get past that, you're into the actual game part of the game. You know, the shoot the bad guys, **** your pants, shoot bad guys and steal their pants part? And then it's mostly all good. It's... well, it's F.E.A.R. The action is pretty much the same as it was during the original, and so is the scary parts. But there's still something that feels off about it all. The Alma sightings are way too many to really become scary. In the first quarter of the game, you see Alma more often than you did through the whole original game. Granted, you also see quite a few more awesome things than you did in the first game as well.

Spoiler: Once you hear the words "Stay away from her, she's mine!" and then watch carnage... Really study the skeleton left behind. It's one of the most awesome things I've ever seen in a game. Horrible beyond words, but sheer awesomeness. With a decent graphics card, you'll be in awe of the artwork done.

Basically, it's very very good but not quite right.

Oh, and there's quicktime events. Yup, the console ********* ruined a perfectly good PC game by introducing bloody quicktime events. I really wish the game devs would stop foisting that crap on us, as it bloody ruins the immersion! Hell, already back in Duke Nukem 3D it was fairly self explanatory that you melee'd off something that was chewing your face off. When Alma or someone else tries that same thing, I'm going to bloody kick it in the teeth without a huge bloody icon flashing in the middle of my screen, screaming MOUSE KEY 2!! SERIOUSLY! CLICK IT NAO!!! That moment completely ruined that particular level for me.

So gameplay wise, the game's been given the same fate as so many others these days. In order to appease the mouthbreathing console tards, it's been dumbed down to a level where it's nigh unplayable by real gamers. The action is good, very much so, and so is the scary parts. But it's got this overall feeling of having been designed for retarded people. Or Americans, I don't know. Hell, I'm really torn on this to be honest. I really enjoy the game, but I also get so bloody annoyed by it as well. It's infuriating. It's like being given the most awesome oral sex you could ever get, but only if you accept having the soles of your feet beaten at the same time. Conflicting sensory input, as it were. Granted, I'd probably enjoy that but that's just me.

There is one thing to note in a very positive way. Even though the game is very linear - which I don't mind, linearity is a powerful storytelling tool - it does give a very very good illusion of a very open world. The level designers have done a great job allowing you to follow what seems to be the most natural and logic path towards the end of the level while making it seem like you had many other options. I reloaded a level to try and follow a different path, and while it certainly felt like a different path, it was still the same progress through the level. It's not truly open, but it feels like it.

You find some very disturbing things throughout the levels, and it's very well put together to give you a very distinct feel of terror, outrage or just plain wrath throughout it all. On the question of level design, I actually have to say PO have done a better job than F.E.A.R did.

The enemies are somewhat varied. Without losing the sense of realism - as much as a supernatural horrorgame can have - you face a decent variety of dangerous enemies. You'll find that you need to adapt to them instead of just switching weapons, which is a good thing. The AI seems to be good, but has one or two glaring flaws. They'll work together very well, flushing you out with grenades or flanking you while others keep you occupied with covering fire. And then someone topples a potted plant to create cover for themselves and the whole thing looks retarded.

There's also the kind of enemy that I hate. The indestructible giant bloody mechawarrior thingys. I don't like these in any games, but that's my own view. The only enemy I really dislike is the ghost thing, but that's only because it can be so bloody hard to tell where it is during one of the "scary" sections. I much prefer the technoninjas (Replica Assassins) instead.

Oh, cover. You can actually do the same in-game. There's a desk in front of you? Flip it over, and you have cover while dealing with the enemies. You'll rarely need it, but it's not too shabby a feature. I just wish that damned icon stopped flashing every time I get close to an object I can interact with. And then you have the "melee" heavy enemies. Fast bastards, fully capable of coming out from the darkness and ripping your throat out or escape as you launch a barrage of bullets against them. In those guys, the AI is actually pretty good. Why? Because they're unpredictable. They make choices I certainly wouldn't have, and thus I can't predict what they'll do. Good work there...

Oh, and I mentioned that you can't cheat in this game. I don't really mind, since I prefer to finish games without cheating. The cheats come on the second and third time I finish the game just so I can explore properly and see if I missed anything the first time around. But this does pose a little problem, because there's not even a console to enter the cheats into. That's right, the game came straight from consoles without a console. This means that tweakers like me, who's been used to fiddle with all the command line functions in every game since Q3 and HL can't even set FOV, lighting or anything in-game.

This is a huge failure in a PC game. Especially in one with multiplayer features. In multiplayer, having console enabled for server administration is necessary. For tweaking, necessary. For information parsing, necessary. Hell, it's necessary for almost everything, and it has it's uses in singleplayer too. In fact, it's so consoleified that you don't even get the server files with the game. This means you can't set up dedicated servers for the game, and have to rely on the fail and ******** that is localservers. Oh, and there's no anti-cheat either, so anyone who's hacked the game can cheat in multiplayer as easily as they could have in singleplayer.

Major minus mark in a game these days. Now, doing a bit of research, after hearing about this failure of a console implementation, I found that there are apparently ways to cheat. You need to go back in time and use Trainers. These are basically small programs that will let you (during gameplay) hit hotkeys which tells the Trainer to edit the gamefiles while you're playing. This means that you can cheat, if you're willing to use third-party software. Reading on the official forums, I found that while unsupported, Monolith won't stop you from doing this.

So, the game is basically F.E.A.R with a new story and slightly shinier graphics. The main differences are the ones forced upon it by consolification, making what could have been great merely mediocre. I still like it, but I also hate it. Especially the quicktime events. Seriously, bloody hate them. Secondly, there's a bit too many of the scary sequences, which means you'll be jaded long before the end.

Graphics

Shiny. It suffers a little from the console tendencies to put film grain on every damn thing in every bloody last one of their games! And slightly too much glow effects for me. But that's not a problem that's unique to this game, but to pretty much every single game made these days. It's actually a very good graphics engine. It doesn't take much to run very smoothly, and can provide an exceptional experience if you've got the hardware.

One single nasty issue: During some of the "cutscenes" where you are limited to headmovement only, you'll see your shoulders clip. Annoying in an otherwise "pretty" game.

Audio/Soundtrack

I couldn't find any issues here. The weapons give very satisfying little noises as you mow down hundreds of enemies at a time, while not giving that overwhelming soundpicture that'll drown the rest of the game's sounds. Any kind of physics fun-time (grenades for instance?) will provide a very decent clatter from objects hitting objects, and it sounds good. The only thing that's annoying, is the overuseage of that screech when something scary happens. It kind of desensitizes you, and since some of the scary bits are dependant on you looking in the right direction at the time, you sometimes hear that screech when looking at a very scary piece of dust.

Multiplayer

Don't bother. Server files weren't released, and there's no anti-cheat. Woooh, console development.

Conclusion

Weeell... Sure, buy it. It's worth the money spent. You just have to remember a few things before you start it up. First, this isn't the original F.E.A.R game. That's kind of the point with sequels, they aren't the first game. This means that you'll have to expect changes. Secondly, this game isn't as good as F.E.A.R was. The first one was bloody excellent, and actually surpassing that... Well, I don't think anyone expected that. Especially since it was developed for consoles, you know. Thirdly, the story is weaker. Personally, I didn't mind the ending at all, but it was a bit of an anticlimax. The story kind of just built and then... well... You'll see.

You're not getting closure, that's for sure.

The weapons are decent enough, the enemies are decent, the AI is decent and the graphics are shiny and new. Storywise, not bad at all. The locations are very well made, and I mostly loved the level designs. If the game had been made entirely without being part of the F.E.A.R universe, and rather been a stand alone game with no previous game to be compared with, it would have been excellent indeed. Except for the ****** quicktime events and console influence. Compared to it's predecessor? Then it's kind of "meh". But still worth the money, if for no other reason than that you want to see Alma scare the **** out of you again.

tl;dr