A wild ride that ultimately much more forgettable than Fear 1
The original Fear was one of the key games that got me into First Person Shooter games, and was a very memorable Horror First Person shooter to boot. Fear 2 evolves and refines the gameplay with some success but loses the tactical and stylized gunplay that made the original so great.
The story of Fear 2 starts a couple of hours prior to the ending of the original and has you playing a new character by the name of Micheal Beckett. Who is part of a military team sent in to retrieve Genevieve Aistride one of the Head people at the sinister Armacham Corperation.
After a brief opening sequence in which you make your way to Aristide you witness the Explosion at the end of Fear 1 and from then onwards you wander the city of Auburn which has now been completely decimated.
Over the course of the game you will fight a group of Mercenary soldiers who want Aristide dead and Later on the Replica forces.
There are also now several new supernatural forces to content with. The first is the Specimens which are crazy demented sub humans who run around on the wall and attempt to jump on you and eat your face! The second is the Remnant, The remnants are the spirits of those who died in the blast but their bodies have continued on as if nothing had happened. If the remnants are interupted thay bring any nearby corpses back to live and send them at you.
The new enemy types add some great new challenges for the player and lead to some great scares particularly from the speciments.
The graphics have been much improved from the Original Fear and the effect for the hallucination sequences are much better than the original. It is a shame that the Destrucability is roughly the same as it was in the original Fear as this plays much less of a role this time.
The soundtrack is also much better than the original with some much more suspensful yet varied tracks.
The gunplay is more refined but loses some of its challenge in the process i also found that the game gave less enemies but bigger enviroments leading to a much easier experience than the original fear.
There are several points during the game where you are able to Pilot the Armored mechs you spent a good deal of time in the original running from. These sequences are extremely satisfying as lay waste the enemies who feebly attempt to take you down.
The blood and gore levels in the game can at times be ludicrous but in a game like Fear it seems to work in favor of the game.
One particular moment in the game that was great was when a character called Snake Fist gets killed, The rreason this was great was Because he is killed by a Replica Assassin (Read :Cyborg Ninjas). The replica assassins were crazy hard and annoying to kill in the First game and its great to see them make a return.
The multiplayer is a blast but due to the lack of people playing it online, kinda forgettable.
Overall Fear 2 is a great refinement of everything that made the original great, However it loses some of the great gunplay as it focuses more on the Horror side of things.
