Tag: fear

F.E.A.R. 3

adseifert
  • Original Release Date: June 21st, 2011
  • Developer: Day 1 Studios
  • Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Summary

Do you like guns?  Do you like ducking and shooting guns?  Do you like running and shooting guns?  Did you dislike all those dark and cramped spaces?  Did you hate the all the spooky noises and paranormal experiences of the first two games?

            If so, then FEAR 3 is the game for you!

            Released a little under half a decade after its predecessor, FEAR 3 (‘F3AR’) was made by a new developer (Day 1 Studios) for reasons that I couldn’t quite dig up through a few minutes of attempted internet research.  Whether or not this hard a big effect on the game’s philosophy or not, there is a clear departure from the prior mainline entries.  FEAR 3 brings back cover mechanics, but it features very little horror elements.  Please bear in mind I didn’t think the previous titles were genuinely scary, but they still made efforts to build an atmosphere of unease and dread through environments, sound design, and occasional jump scare-esque bits.  None of that is strongly present in FEAR 3 (at least compared to the first two), which forgoes some of the design principles/hallmarks of the previous two entries to focus mostly on gunplay and co-op.

            If you’re adept at Call of Duty or any modern shooter that relies on cover to survive, you’ll get the hang of this game quickly.  For me, it took about half the game before I found a groove, but even then, the game was more challenging than the second title.  It doesn’t help that there were many occasions where I got murdered despite being in cover.

            I was unable to play multiplayer or co-op, but everything seems to indicate that they were both reasons for people to play this game on release.  Local co-op allowed two people to play as Point Man (your standard commando type with bullet time) and Fettel (a ghost with mind powers who can possess enemies) simultaneously and even compete through challenges (again akin to Call of Duty).

            In the end, FEAR 3 appears to be a serviceable co-op FPS, possibly akin to how Resident Evil 5’s multiplayer made the game less awful.  I’m unsure how popular multiplayer for it may be, but it was apparently enjoyable in that regard as well.  Unfortunately, the game falls short in furthering the ‘legacy’ of its predecessors and seemingly cares little about expanding on the grim, dark world that defined the franchise.

Technical/Presentation (5/10)

Gameplay

            Well, it goes without saying that there are some drastic… shifts from the gameplay presented in the second entry in the trilogy.  The HUD elements are vanished, along with collecting anything outside of grenades, ammo, and certain items that boost your score.  Yes, there’s a score-type system, where the game presents you with various challenges throughout each Interval.  Completing challenges boosts a score, and at certain thresholds, you will rank up and unlock new abilities and/or boosts to health or reflexes/psychic power.  Cover is a major aspect of this game, with specialized controls for maneuvering around cover, as well as peeking around cover serving as an important function.  This, combined with the leveling via mass homicide through ingenious means system makes this game feel very Call of Duty-esque.

They kept Point Man mute, and I can’t help but feel like, given how everyone else speaks and how visible he is during all the scenes, that is almost makes the game feel more comedic than intended.

            The game presents you with two characters—Point Man and Fettel.  One is the protagonist from the first game, with his slow-mo powers and access to two (TWO) weapons at a time.  Fettel can’t use weapons, but he can possess enemies and use a variety of psychic powers.  Fettel is unlocked for a level once your clear it as Point Man.  The game boosts a co-op where you and a partner can play as both characters at one time and compete to complete more challenges.  I feel like this co-op is at the heart of the game, and in many ways, it might be the best-selling point for what is otherwise a Call of Duty-style arcade shooter.

            I can’t stress enough how much of a departure this feels from the original.  You can sprint almost endlessly, and that’s coupled with the fact that your score is impacted by your time.  Along with that, health regeneration kills a lot of the suspense and dread that usually comes with spooky FPS titles.  If I can just wait until my health is full before moving on, I don’t have to worry.  On the other hand, I constantly had to worry about cover, because there were so many occasions where I would crouch behind cover and still get shot to (almost) death.  While I liked the handful of mech driving moments in FEAR 2, I thought it was a bit overdone here.  Again, it might be the fault of regenerating health, but these moments just felt like filler with close to zero stakes (like much of the game).

            Again, I unfortunately can’t comment on the co-op or the multiplayer, which I didn’t experience.  Some research told me that there’s a lot of variety there and a lot of fun to be had.

Visuals

This game looks great and has some really nice set pieces, but the actual scares aren’t as frequent as they were in previous titles

            The environment resembles what you would expect from a title in the early 2010s.  In a divergence from the previous titles, I’d wager that the majority of this game takes place in open or semi-open spaces.  Even the stages built around navigating inside tend to be large spaces (like the supermarket or the bridge) that stave off any sensation of claustrophobia that you may have felt in the first or second game.  The horror is almost entirely absent in this game.  Alma still pops up, and there’s another menacing creature that stalks you from time to time, but aside from a few subtle moments and some jump scares, there’s little horror in this title.  Occasionally, you might feel a bit of sensory overload but the horror’s gone.

            On a side note, it’s worth saying that while the environments aren’t half bad, the characters in this game look terrible (at least to me).  Something just seems off about all of them.  The proportions just seem weird… as if they were trying to make them look a little cartoony, almost.  I prefer the character designs from the first game, even if the graphics engine couldn’t render the same degree of detail. 

Sound

            The soundtrack in the game isn’t terrible, but there’s nothing that stood out to me.  For this series, that’s slightly damning, since I enjoyed the soundtrack in the original, and while the sequel wasn’t as good, it still had some nice remixes and original music.  Having just finished this game, I can’t say that anything stood out to me, because most of the time is spent running, crouching, and shooting at enemies.  I do enjoy that the enemies talk a lot more than they did in the second title.  The guns and all the other sound effects felt a bit muted, which made it a little less satisfying to slaughter people.  As the focus is more on action and less on horror, the title also doesn’t do quite as much with environmental noises, outside of the supernatural occasionally screaming or throwing stuff around.

Story (4/10)

            The plot of this game is awful, both in terms of the pacing and the overall satisfaction of the story.  The story of FEAR 3 opens up about eight or nine months after its predecessor with the Point Man (the protagonist from the original game) in a prison.  He is rescued by his brother Paxton Fettel, who one of the main antagonists in the first game.  The two don’t trust each other but agree that they need to head back to Fairport, the setting for the first two games.  Fairport is still the center of a paranormal clusterfuck, and Armacham is still working very hard to cover up their mistakes that led to the whole city being ruined and its populace either dying or degrading into mindless lunatics.

Returning characters! All that fresh continuity!

            The brothers get in touch with Jin Sun-Kwon, one of the survivors from the first game and a squadmate of the Point Man.  In a brief reunion, she points (some humor) Point Man in the direction of Michael Bennet—the second game’s main character—who is being taken away by Armacham security.  Bennet apparently had a very unpleasant (for him) run-in with Alma, the series’ iconic scary ghost girl/woman.  After losing Bennet, the brothers murder there way to Bennet and then onward to Alma, where they are able to resolve form long-standing issues with their father, the late Harlan Wade.

Spoiler Zone

            I’m not sure why they took the Point Man to Brazil, but they did.  After being confused why the people were talking in not-English, a Google search told me they had taken him to Brazil rather than just killing him.

             As I mentioned above, the plot is just awful, and I believe they exacerbated that by removing lore objects from the game.  The closest thing this game has to story building are the occasional comments/witty retorts from Paxton Fettel, who is this game’s version of the Cheshire Cat and evil conscious.  He has a Vegeta-tier widow’s peak to complement the perma-scowl and cave man appearance of his brother, the Point Man.  Despite having a face, the Point Man uses it to only scowl, as he has no spoken dialogue in the game (I believe that his child version doesn’t speak either).  They don’t state if this is something intentional or not, but I can’t believe he’s incapable of speech, since he was apparently in the army before the events of the first game.

            Anyway, there’s very little story that unfolds across the game, which is shorter than the original or the sequel.  The game does have narration and cut scenes, but these are almost entirely used to showcase the pair of protagonists as children.  There’s allusions to other stuff going on, but it’s hard to tell how wide-spread the situation in Fairport is/has become.  Is it global?  Is it regional?  Is it just this city?

            As I’ve mentioned in prior reviews for the series, it was hard for me to really villainize Alma (with the exception of the end of the second game).  In this game, she’s pregnant, and her contractions are the source of much of the psychic disturbances across the various stages.  The two characters are going to find their mother.  Along the way, they locate Becket, who doesn’t offer anything new to the player before getting exploded as a by-product of Fettel possessing him. I felt a bit bad for Becket, who earlier in the game was on the edge of lunacy over being raped by a psychic ghost.  There’s nothing given to explain how he was rescued/extracted, and you don’t hear about the fate of Aristide.  If her plan was to contain Alma, she seems to have failed.  Even so, Alma is little in this game beyond Young Alma popping up in mostly non-threatening moments. 

            There’s a generic faceless monster-looking creature that serves the purpose of jumping the player (like Alma in FEAR 2), and you later discover that this is a psychic manifestation linked to memories of Harlan Wade.  It isn’t that he’s still alive, but the memories of him have coalesced into this sinister monster that scares Young Alma and threatens the protagonists until they kill it as the final boss.  Then you get an ending based on which brother had a higher score.  As I did single player as Point Man, I got the ending where he kills Fettel again, saves the baby, and watches Alma vanish.  Fettel’s ending has him possess Point Man, take the baby, and devour Alma for ‘unlimited power’ I imagine.

Reflection

            In many ways, this game feels like a major disappointment for this franchise.  The story is barebones, with little additional information to uncover and little done to flesh out this collapsed/post-apocalyptic city.  This game was 100% not designed to be an engrossing single player experience, and that much is clear from the variety of decisions made in regards to central gameplayer mechanics.  There are no new characters in this game, and the characters that are throwbacks to the previous titles feel almost more like fan-service or plot dumps (look, its Jin! Hear her tell you what to do next!  Okay, now she’s gone again) than actual people.  It doesn’t help that the game stripped out all the horror and foreboding environments from the first two games.  The ending itself adds a nonsensical cherry on top.

Bias/Nostalgia Tint – “Zero ghost babies out of five.”

            This was my first exposure to this game in any sense of the word.

Overall: C-

Playtime

  • 5 Hours (4/11-4/12/2020)

Achievements

  • 13/50 (26%) in one playthrough

F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon)

adseifert
  • Original Release Date: October 2005
  • Developer: Monolith Productions
  • Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games, Warner Bros. Games

Summary

FEAR was a game I had in my ‘pc library’ (which was likely a bookshelf or a plastic bin) as a teenager.  I have only the vaguest impressions of playing the game and can’t remember if I finished it (I probably did, I was usually good at that).  In my brain, it’s overshadowed by a few other FPS titles that came out in the same early-to-mid 2000s-time frame, like Max Payne (technically third person but the concepts pervaded the FPS genre enough), Serious Sam, and Metroid Prime.  I regret to inform that I barely touched Half-Life near its original release (non-intentionally).

Back when PC games came in layers upon layers of cardboard

FEAR settles very well into the mold of FPS titles in the era between Doom II and the modern era of yearly Call of Duty sequels and party death match titles (not to say there aren’t modern FPS gems).  It’s a shooter game where the emphasis is on reflexes (bullet time is present in a big way) and fighting waves of ‘intelligent’ enemies who duck for cover, lay down suppressing fire, and attempt to coordinate flanking maneuvers.  You’ll die every now and again, for me it was mostly self-caused or from one-shot weapons.  Other than that, it’s not a terribly challenging game on standard difficulty, as weapons, ammo, and armor/health are found to the point where I often found myself with the limit of med packs.

Story-wise, the game also hits the standard tropes of its era.  You’re in an FPS title where the situation starts out seemingly okay before spiraling into chaos and nightmares (a la Half-Life).  You uncover a story about a psychic-controlled army of clones and their commander, who seems to come and go as he pleases.  Later on, you discover links to a mysterious project and a little girl Alma who pops up to spook you as you delve deeper into a very unsettling plot (details below).

All said and done, FEAR is a solid FPS title.  It is a game that didn’t bore me, thanks in part to engaging enemy design and a nice atmosphere of spookiness and solid sound.  I also apologize that I can’t comment on the multiplayer, because anytime I tried to load it up, the game would crash (Clicking ‘Yes’ for ‘Switch to Multiplayer’ caused game crash with no error message).

Technical/Presentation (7/10)

Gameplay

Your standard FPS from the post-Matrix era.  That is to say, you rely a lot on bullet time to seamlessly navigate the game’s harder challenges.  In game, they refer to this as ‘reflexes’.  Other than that, this is an FPS game where you are inventory limited.  You can carry three weapons at a time, but it’s pretty easy to swap on the go or even during longer combat sequences.  I was a fan of dual pistols.  The expansion packs add some heftier weapons, like a lightning gun and a grenade launcher, but aside from that, it’s standard fare (pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, and a few variations of machine guns/assault rifles).  Explosives are present, and you can melee opponents (there’s even a jumping kick thing that I rarely used). 

Controls were fine for me, and I only have minimal complain much here.  Run through the stage and kill what’s in your way.  Along the way, you can collect powerups for health and the reflexes bar.  My only issue was the placement of some buttons, particularly having the flashlight and first aid on the z and x buttons.  It made it a bit hard to press them while maneuver in combat, and I occasionally pressed g, which switches you to some kind of melee. There’s also little bits of story, and it’ll occasionally break up the pacing with horror vignettes (sometimes just a quick scare and other times taking up chunks of an interval).  The end of each episodes often delves into horror fare, with the enemies being ghosts and ghouls of various threat levels.  No boss fights, but you’ll have to occasionally battle very strong enemies to progress.

One thing to highlight here that was a hallmark and selling point at the time is the enemy AI.  At the time of the game’s release, the enemies were touted for being highlight advanced.  The enemies frequently communicate with one another and even go so far as to layout strategies like suppressing fire and use of grenades.  Enemies will duck into cover (research told me this was novel at the time) and even try to flank the protagonist.  Larger enemies, like the mechs that occasionally appear as pseudo-bosses, ignore this and tend to head straight at the character or even just standstill and fire.  The AI does make the game more enjoyable, because you can get the drop on enemies and even attempt to disengage and reengage at various points.

Visuals

This game is still very kind to the eyes for its age.  I was able to smoothly run it at high graphics settings as the difference between high and max wasn’t really enough to make me want to sacrifice a few more frames.  By modern standards, I still think the game looks pleasant, as there was very little blockiness.  The lighting was never an issue to me, either. 

As a brooding teenager there were few things that I found more metal than a room full of pixelated and/or polygonal corpse bits with bloody smears everywhere

The one big knock I can think of in this regard is the fact that it feels like there’s a lot of recycling of assets across the base game and expansion packs.  It felt like, across the three scenarios, you always had some sort of abandoned building, a lab-type facility, subway tunnels, and street blocks.  This isn’t saying it was verbatim the same maps, but the visuals felt very similar.  There’s a variety of different troop types, but I think it caps out at maybe 3 or 4 per faction.  Also, the game lacks any sort of progression in terms of enemy damage, although that may be a limitation of the time.

Sound

I have to say, I loved the sound throughout the three episodes.  I’m accustomed to the standard riggermarole of heavy metal or heavy industrial tracks that are fairly common in 2000s and late 90s FPS titles.  What I liked about FEAR is that there’s a high amount of variety in the soundtracks that play when you’re in combat.  In Extraction Point, they started busting out what I can only describe as a tense kind of tribal music.  Maybe that’s the wrong way to explain it, but I really enjoyed that track.  The ambiance was done well, especially with the intermittent ‘horror/scare’ scenes and the music and sounds employed there.

Story (6/10)

(Not my screenshot) The game, and its spooky ghost girl, will have anyone recalling mid-aughts J-horror.

I feel like most FPS titles fall into one of two categories:  Story-focused or Story-lite.  The former would be your Bioshocks or your Max Paynes, where there’s a lot of story and dialogue to digest and process as you one-man-army your way through a horde of people or monsters.  FEAR is story-lite.  Yes, you have supporting characters and there are scenes that play out through the game’s engine, but aside from that, it doesn’t feel like it’s the focus.  You’ll discover the core of the story by playing the game and being told the story through the other characters, particularly Paxston Fettel (the antagonist, kind of) and Rowdy Betters (your boss).  As you murder your way through a variety of settings, you can learn more by listening to voicemails on landlines (press F to pay respects) and hacking into laptops.

The protagonist in the game is your standard FPS protagonist—silent and faceless—and referred to as the ‘Point Man.’  In the expansion packs, you continue the Point Man’s story (Extraction Point) and also play another operative (the Sergeant) on a secondary FEAR mission that is concurrent with the base game and Extraction Point.  Supporting characters include the other two members of the FEAR squads, the Wade’s, an obese tech worker, and Delta Force (of which a few named people support across all three episodes). 

Spoiler Zone

The plot sees an unhinged Fettel controlling an army of replicants to besiege the headquarters of the company who created said replicants (Armachan Technology Corporation, ATC).  The FEAR squad is sent in to kill Fettel, but the situation goes sour when one member of the squad vanishes (Jankowski) and another (Jin) is injured.  The Point Man presses on to pursue Fettel, and along the way, he starts to hallucinate a some nightmare fuel (ghosts, ghouls – your standard bloody schlock).  Fettel appears and disappears at will.  A little girl in a red dress pops up.  The Point Man hallucinates about a corridor in a hospital. 

You eventually discover that Fettel is the son of Alma, who was a powerful psychic and was supposed to be the way that ATC would coordinate their army of replicas.  At some point in the past, there was a ‘Synchronicity Event’ where Alma reached out to a young Fettel and had him murder some people.  ATC tries to cover up what they did, but the Point Man pushes on to an underground facility where Alma is supposedly in stasis.  You find out that Harlan Wade, father of Alice Wade (who you rescue in an earlier mission), plans to release Alma.  He’s also her dad, but she repays him with murder.  Alice and Fettel are also killed, and the Point Man rushes to escape.

In Extraction Point, you continue as the Point Man.  Alma chases you (appearing as both the little girl and as a naked woman with long, black hair).  Grownup Alma is a clear cash-in on the horror movie scene of the mid-2000s, with her look seeing straight out of a Japanese horror film.  Picking up from the explosion of the facility, Extraction Point has the Point Man escaping the blast only to get separated from Jin and Delta Force’s Doug Holiday.  Fettel is also back (for reasons he doesn’t seem to understand).  Both Doug and Jin die along the way, which takes the Point Man through the city, an industrial district, a subway, and finally to a hospital.  At the end, the Point Man tries to escape only for Fettel to sabotage the helicopter, and the Point Man survives and watches the city continue to burn.

In Perseus Mandate, you control a member of a second FEAR squad.  This game features another faction (mercenaries called the Nightcrawlers) and has a lot more use of allied helpers.  There’s also a spooky Senator trying to coordinate a coverup, much like ATC in the base game.  The FEAR squad in Mandate finds themselves at another ATC compound, where they discover much of the same information as the base game.  Surviving the run-in at the research facility, the FEAR Sergeant finds himself running from the explosion (the facility in the base game exploding) and landing in the subway tunnels.  He makes his way to yet another ATC Facility, where the Nightcrawlers are after Alma’s DNA.  Experiencing hallucinations much like the Point Man, the Sergeant battles an army of mercenaries, replicants, and ATC security to recover Alma’s DNA and escape.

Reflection

The core story, when you shed aside all the bullets and nonsense, is that of “Physic child murderer and the people who want to take advantage of her.”  Now, the extra stuff is what makes this really garish the more I think about it, as I’m fairly certain that Harlan Wade states at some point that they like, impregnate Alma multiple times while she was comatose and then sealed her back up after she gave birth.  Given the ages, I’m guessing she was a teenager when they did this, and the fact that her father was part of all of this only adds to the unsettling nature of this story.  They mention that they took her off life support and she died, so I found myself wondering if it was all just psychic manifestations.  Yet, she gets ‘released’ at the end of the game, so I imagine there had to be something sealed away inside that vault (a psychic spirit?).  That would seem to tie into the fact that the scary/supernatural stuff in the games is often prefaced by white noise on the radio (another tie-in to Japanese horror, if I’m not mistaken). 

Having said ALL that, I don’t really know how much I can fault the killer super child for wanting to murder everyone, since even her own dad used and abused her from the earlies age possible.  If anything, Alma comes across as a Frankenstein-type villain where you can’t really fault them.  We all cheered for the Bride in those Kill Bill films when she murdered everyone.  Alma (or whatever ghost, physic phantom, scifi-trope she has become) just wants some of that too.

Bias/Nostalgia Tint – “One misunderstood ghost monster out of Five”

I owned the base game as a kid.  I remember buying it at Walmart back when physical copies of PC games were a thing.  It came in one of those lovely carboard boxes with a bunch of discs.  That said, I remembered nothing of the game, outside of ‘spooky little girl’, so I can safely say I probably had very little intentional bias. (Alex from 2021: ‘Misunderstood ghost monster’ does NOT age well)

Overall: B-

Playtime

  • F.E.A.R – 8 hours (April 1 to 3, 2020)
  • Extraction Point – 4 hours (April 4, 2020)
  • Perseus Mandate – 3 hours (April 6, 2020)

Achievements

  • Game predates achievements