Complete Review: Alma Won’t Kill You, But Boredom Might

Though FEAR 2 was released back in February ’09, the developers aren’t keen to see it forgotten. With a new DLC released, and a more affordable pricetag, curious gamers are starting to eye this game with renewed interest. Now seems like a good time for an honest review.

I originally purchased this for the PS3, and enjoyed the first level, but had to return it due to my hatred of playing FPS’s with a controller. Then to my surprise, Steam offered both the main game and the DLC for half price! I recall my famous last thoughts being: ‘Oh, what the heck? Might as well!’

Me and my stupid impulse buys.

                                                           (For the TLDR Crowd)

Pros:
* Decent graphics
* Satisfying gore
* Decent sound
* Mildly interesting story (to some)
* Return of the nail gun
* Gets the action part right
* Main game a reasonable length: 8-10 hours

Cons:
* Tries too hard to be both a shooter and a horror game
* Fails at both because of it.
* Not scary
* Seasoned FPS gamers will find it too easy
* Story ultimately pretty bad, nearly identical to the first
* No replay value
* Writing horrible, voice acting worse
* Visuals very dark and very bland
* Levels boring, funnelled and uninspired
* Limited amount of enemies
* Alma still not a threat
* DLC only 45 minutes long

            


Back in 2005, the gaming world was awed when a new type of horror/action game hit the shelves. The original FEAR featured amazing enemy AI, destructible environments, impressive weapons, and a small girl who didn’t want to play nice. For some, it was hailed as the perfect shooter.

Then the expansions arrived, offering more of the same. These received less favourable reviews, and eventually the flaws people didn’t want to see, slowly became acknowledged.

The game’s were dark and bland, and the graphics didn’t really make up for that. Level designs were mind numbingly generic, with the same set pieces used over and over. The battles were great, but the enemy types so limited that each fight felt like it had been fought before. And the focus of the game’s horror, the dreaded telepath ‘Alma’, was only scary until you realised she posed no threat at all.

With so many people venting their distaste, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the sequel, “FEAR 2: Project Origin”, might have attempted to rectify these short comings. Sadly, it does no such thing. It’s same game with a slight graphical upgrade and a different main character.

And still not a scare to be found.

          


Like the first game, FEAR 2 is a first person horror shooter. Or so it claims. Due to the development team (Monolith Productions) opting for a more real world setting, the horror is limited to out right gore, hallucinations, and the odd mutant. A few supernatural elements are present, like ghosts and Alma herself, but nothing players nowadays would consider “horrific”. Despite allusions to the contrary, the FEAR experience is almost entirely militant.

The end result is a game that’s not exactly a straight shooter, but not a true horror either; a problematic theme almost identical to the original’s. The gameplay alternates between pseudo frightening quiet periods and adrenaline pumping action sequences so fast, that neither style ends up effective. Horror fans get put off by the excessive bang bangs, action fans get bored waiting for something to happen.

I’m not saying these two game types can’t be successfully blended. In the right hands, in the right universe, many good FPS’s with horror elements have been made (STALKER, anyone?).  FEAR’s setting is just so bland and limited, so uninspired and generic, that there’s no room for the developers to move. They have little choice but to try and make it work.

And dear lord, do they try. The game practically oozes desperation. Rather then finding ways to address the issues, Monolith simply tries even harder to mesh the genres together. They’re like children forcing Lego pieces to connect with Duplos, and we have to play with the end result.

Ultimately, FEAR 2 is a collection of the same “scary moments” that we’ve seen a million times before, mixed with the most basic run‘n’gun gameplay you can find. There’s very little originality, very few memorable moments, and next to no reason to play it ever again once it’s finished.

Yet, after experiencing the first game, one might wonder “Is that really a surprise?”

              
 

FEAR 2 begins thirty minutes before the end of the first game. Taking the role of a soldier named “Becket”, a member of the elite ‘Delta Squad’, the player and his team mates are tasked with tracking down Genevieve Aristide, the president of Armacham. Due to the incriminating evidence found by the protagonist of the first game, linking Genevieve and Armacham to the incarceration of Alma and other telepathic experiments, she is due to be arrested.

Before they can reach their goal, however, the explosion from the end of FEAR 1 occurs, and Becket and his team are rendered unconscious.

Awakening later in a hospital, after undergoing some brutal and unscrupulous surgery, the Delta Squad find they are the unwitting subjects of more telepathy experiments, and are now gifted with heightened abilities (a.k.a bullet time). They continue to give chase to Genevieve through the ruined city, all the while being hunted by Armacham miliary, Replica soldiers, hideous mutants and Alma herself. It’s a struggle to survive against zzzzzzzzz…..

I’m sorry, dozed off there. If you played the first game, you’ll immediately recognise how familiar the story is. As in it’s the same goddam story. You’re an elite soldier, in an elite squad, who’s other members die one by one, while in pursuit of a person you really don’t care about, from the very first minute of the game until the last. Alma wants to kill you, but she never does, and in the end there’s a cliffhanger that’s about as fascinating as your average Twitter post.

WOW! Look out, Planescape: Torment, you’ve got competition!

To make matters worse, the story is delivered by dialogue so poorly written that even a D Grade movie director would cringe, and in text logs that read more like “SECRET HUMAN TELEPATHY RESEARCH COMPANIES FOR DUMMIES” then subtle hints to an overall storyline. The only way they could make things more obvious is if the characters spelt things out for you every chance they got.

Oh wait: THEY DO!

It’s best not to read too deeply into FEAR 2’s plot, since it’s truly more horrific then anything you fight in the game. Some of the characters lines were delivered so badly, I actually laughed in disbelief. How does this stuff get past the playtesters? Can’t they hear how god awful it sounds?

Conclusion: I’ve seen better things written on paper with crayons.

            


On PC, FEAR 2’s graphics aren’t bad. They might be grey generic, and bland, but they aren’t bad. And compared to the PS3, they’re fantastic. Don’t ask me why the PS3 version looked so awful on my HD 40 inch Sony Bravia TV, but it did. I can honestly say that the PC version was a 150% improvement.

The prettiest level you’ll come across is the first, before the bomb goes off. It features a stunning amount of colour compared to the rest of the game; bright hotel settings, some interesting décor to destroy, a charming twilight over a glowing city. It’s nice. It’s what got me hooked when I first played it on the PS3.

Once that bomb goes off, however, it’s all starts to go downhill. Back to the dark corridors, back to the boring offices. You’re funnelled here, you’re channelled there. No branching paths or choices. They try to mix things up with a school level, but really that’s just another office in disguise. About the only parts that do stand out are the city streets.

The city has been nearly levelled after the explosion, with the radioactive dust casting an eerie red glow over everything. Charred corpses of civilians who didn’t have time to run litter the streets, and will disperse in a cloud of ash if you touch them. Compared to the inside of a building, the new tileset is a welcome change.

The biggest problem I had with the first game was the limited amount of set pieces. You saw the same hammer, the same sign, the same file cabinet or cluster of office desks a thousand times. There was no variety. FEAR 2 is equally as guilty, and the horror atmosphere suffers substantially because of it. Take the second level as an example: the hospital the Delta Squad wakes up in.

You wander around. It’s dark, it’s creepy. You find a blood trail. It leads to… a corpse on the toilet! Ahhh ooohhh scary. Then, a few rooms down, you find… the same corpse! Only in a different position! Keep pushing on, and you’ll discover an examination table with a doctor lying on it, stuck full of needles. In fact, you’ll find no fewer then four of the exact same doctors, on the exact same tables, filled with the same needles. Obviously this kills any kind of tension the game can work up. The impact of the ‘scares’ just wane into tedium.

And it’s not limited to the dead character models. The enemies have ridiculously few skins. The soldiers are similar to the point where I struggled to tell the difference between the Replicas and the regular army. Not that it mattered. The crawling mutants have one skin only, so even they stop being interesting after the first few.

If there’s anything that’ll keep today’s gamers happy, it’s the gore. Limbs and heads can be blown off with ease, showering the screen in gratuitous amounts of carnage. The best scene in the whole game involves an up close, full frontal, slow motion decapitation. Don’t know how that got through our Australian classification groups.

The final verdict? A mild upgrade from the original FEAR, but not much. You won’t be gawking at anything here.