F.E.A.R. 2 delivers.
I don't know why I waited so long to play this one. I love the original F.E.A.R. so you'd think this would've been a no-brainer.
F.E.A.R. 2 takes place concurrently (only for a short time) and during the aftermath of the first F.E.A.R. You play a SFOD soldier named Becket whose team is grabbed by Armacham, juiced full of experimental drugs, and then sent on a mission to stop Alma while chasing down leads on the how and the why of it all. You get the gist of the story in radio communications and in-game cutscenes but all the details are in logs scattered throughout the levels, similar to the first game but there's a lot of more of them this time.
F.E.A.R. had amazing graphics at the time and Project Origin doesn't disappoint. The effects are similar to the first game with lots of sparks and dust when the bullets fly. The best looking effects come when you're having hallucinations. Colors fade, return, your view goes blurry and sharp, lights flash on and off. It's impossible to describe effectively.
A big complaint about the first game was the lack of variety in environments. It was a lot of offices and industrial areas. Personally it didn't bother me much, but Monolith took it to heart. Of course there's more offices and industrial parks but there's also a school, a medical facility, research labs, and the destroyed streets of Auburn. You never feel like you're walking the same corridors over and over and no one environment really overstays its welcome.
F.E.A.R. 2 also has the same fantastic gunplay that the first game had. Enemies are quasi-intelligent in dropping for cover and flanking your positions. That said, on normal difficulty, the game never gets too hard. I don't think I died a single time. Between the abundance of armor and health packs, the whole game is just a little easy. The only nuance that threw me at the beginning is that when you hit the slo-mo button on and off, there's a little bit of a spin-up and spin-down. It was basically an on-off switch in the first game so having a second of delay really threw me off at the beginning.
My favorite part of this game were the areas where you get to stomp around in the elite power armor. It isn't just for the amazing amounts of firepower the elite power armor brings, or the carnage of the fights you get into with it, but the effects while you're in it. As it takes more damage, alarms scream, the screen gets distorted, and warnings flash manically. It's a hell of a lot of fun and really makes me clamor for Monolith to make good on the easter eggs it's put in recent games and make a sequel to SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division, a mech game they made a decade ago.
There's no easier way to put it: F.E.A.R. 2 is an awesome first-person shooter. I played through it all in a single day, which is a task I don't think I've ever done. It's basically amazing.
