FEAR 2 review

[MinisterofDOOM]

I finished the game today.

It's a great game with some notable shortcomings, some of which can be corrected easily with patches.

The meat of the gameplay is fantastic. Control is superb, the weapons feel and respond very well, and firefights are a lot of fun. Once you acquire your enhanced reflexes, making strategic use of them ads a new dimension to the combat. Gunfights feel very visceral and downing a soldier with a well-placed burst-shot from the submachine gun is supremely satsifying. Later in the game, the enemies seem to ramp up drastically in toughness and go from one-hit kills to "Just DIE already!" which seems kind of incongruous and odd, but isn't really a dealbreaker considering the arsenal at your disposal.

On the subject of the arsenal, the weapon selection is good. Unlike other "limited carry" games with Halo-style weapon swapping, I never felt forced to abandon a fun weapon for a practical weapon. Every gun in the game works well and the game does a good job of making sure you have the opportunity to select the most appropriate loadout before a major fight. The two big energy weapons in the game are very fun to use and more unique than I've come to expect from shooters these days.

The game has a few pseudo-vehicle sections, including some stints in powered combat armor. Actually, these sections show just how good Monolith is as a developer. They are interspersed PERFECTLY throughout the game providing some of the best pacing I can ever recall in any game. They're a lot of fun, shake things up, and keep the game from becoming a monotony of well-disguised linear pathways.

Now onto the downsides:

The storytelling in this game isn't as exceptional as the first. And by that I don't mean the story is bad, but rather that the exposition itself is mundane. The first game used varied forms of media, including voicemail messages, emails, audio recordings, etc. to relay the background details of the story. In Fear 2, all you get is text. No voice acting outside the main game characters. It kind of detracts from the involvement that the first game's take produced. Still, what you do read is always worth reading.

The game has no support for binding extra mouse buttons. I would have LOVED to bind the slow-mo function to one of my G9's 4 extra buttons, but the game wouldn't recognize them in the keybindings menu. So I was stuck with using a key instead.

The game just wasn't that creepy. Most of my time with this game was alone, at night, in a completely dark room with a good speaker setup. It wasn't that creepy at all. It was NEAT, but not spooky. And some parts that I gather were supposed to be scary (the specters, for instance) were so IRRITATING that any fear factor from them was forgotten in frustration.I expected the game to be much more creepy than it was.

Games with swappable weapon inventories like this NEED a way to quickly re-assign number keys to the weapons. Unlike traditional FPS weapon systems, each weapon doesn't have a permanent number. So in a heavy fight, you can whack 3 expecting your shotgun but end up with a sniper rifle. NOT good. The only way around this is to find an EXTRA weapon you don't have and spend time dropping and picking up weapons carefully to get them in the order you want.And, worse, after some major level loads, I found that my weapon order would mystically rearrange itself of it's own accord. Fun thing to find out in a firefight.

And I found numerous instances throughout the game where the corner-lean feature from the first game would have been hugely beneficial. Why is it gone?

So, to summarise:Supremely well-paced shooter with engrossing shootouts, good atmosphere, and super control feel. But it needs some help in the control mapping and story exposition department and could have been much scarier. I don't think it's as exceptional as it's predecessor, but it's still one of the best PC shooters of the last decade.

[BusyBadger]

Thanks for posting a review of this game!

I downloaded the demo on XBL and didn't like it very much but may end up renting it for some more tirgger time with it. I may even pick up the orginal Fear if you think its worth it. I'm looking for somethign to feed my spooky shooter fix until a new Doom gets released.

I'm trying not to pcik up any new games right now though...I need to finish up Fable 2, Gears 2 & Fallout 3...plus Riddick is just around the corner.

[MinisterofDOOM]

The original FEAR is one of the best games I've ever played. It's in my top 3 shooters with Half Life and HL2.

I'm looking forward to Riddick.