F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

Two non-canonical expansions, corporate pugilism over who owns what and now it’s finally here: A true sequel to the unabashedly and gloriously over the top F.E.A.R., F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. This is the first F.E.A.R. game Monolith has taken development duties on since the release of the original classic and… it’s a vastly different game. F.E.A.R. 2 feels different in the feel of its shooting, the action and how everything feels compared to its predecessor. It’s tough to jot down one obvious detail that reveals this schism; there are many subtle and obvious tweaks to the core gameplay that add up to a sequel that feels substantially different and entirely justified. Ultimately, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is a rock-solid shooter that’s entertaining, memorable and if you a have weak heart and a fragile mind, horrifyingly scary.

F.E.A.R. ended on a cliffhanger. An explosive one. F.E.A.R. 2 takes place 30 minutes before said cliffhanger, away from the immediate vicinity of where the explosion takes place. You even take control of a brand new character, Becket. Just like the point man in the original, you’re an enigmatic mute and you’re part of the First Encounter Assault Recon, or F.E.A.R. for short, even though both are equally irritating to type out. Eventually, the game catches up to the cataclysmic end in F.E.A.R. and the city’s in ruins. The game’s cover girl, Alma, is unleashed and it’s up to you and your squad to find a way to kill her before she kills everything.     
 
Having strong ties with the first game, it initially felt underwhelming when the faith of the point man, Jin and all the characters from F.E.A.R. were never given proper resolutions, but Becket intertwines with the overall arc well enough that eventually, I became focused on him and his relevance to Alma. You don’t need to play the first game to understand second; the story stands on its own well enough and how F.E.A.R. 2 completely distances itself from the characters from the original helps. That’s not to say playing F.E.A.R. before jumping into its sequel won’t be beneficial, though. There are references to previous characters and the many intel items scattered throughout the game dole out plot details that are much more substantial to anyone who’s played F.E.A.R. Monolith’s found a nice middle ground – the story is accessible for newcomers and veterans will find that F.E.A.R. 2 pushes the story forward. Yeah, the game does end on another cliffhanger, a really, really weird cliffhanger, and while Monolith still hasn’t been able to conjure up the excellent prose they delivered in No One Lives Forever 1 (No One Lives Forever 2 does not deserve to belong in the same franchise, but I digress.), F.E.A.R. 2’s script is good enough to put it above forgettable, but way below exceptional. The banter between your squad is occasionally funny and makes them more than just objective providers with a gruff face. Overall, F.E.A.R. 2’s story is more than just an excuse to make you do the things. Monolith’s also made an admirable effort to answer some of the questions lingering in F.E.A.R.’s lore, but that does lead to a multitude of new ones. Still, I’m interested in the game’s universe and I want to know more. Just don’t end on a cliffhanger next time, please.

Even if you decide to not care for the narrative or you just never cared in the first place, the gunplay should sate appetites. This is where it gets weird, though. F.E.A.R. 2’s combat is not nearly as visually frenetic, chaotic and over the top as F.E.A.R, but I found it to be nearly as fun. There are a lot of special effects that have toned down or completely removed – shooting anything metal doesn’t create the same, dizzying fireworks, a lot of objects don’t show decals, walls don’t vomit out the absurd amount of dust and particles when shot at, dust doesn’t build up and subside during and after each firefight, slow-mo lacks the same insanity and stylish panache and in general, I never felt like I tore the game’s world apart. Even the physics feel toned down and restrained. The shotgun used to send enemy soldiers into backflips, triple axles and every single gymnastic maneuver you could think of, but now, a simple plop and they fall the ground. The game’s two shotguns feel incredibly unsatisfying to fire off as a result.     
 
I know it seems shallow to have a ranting paragraph on visuals, but a satisfying output is a reason why shooters tend to be so cathartic. They feel good. You input an action and you expect a solid output. Interaction is why we play games. You make a choice and you’re given a consequence. F.E.A.R. 2 doesn’t react as adversely when I shoot things and stuff.

But it sure as hell offers an extreme reaction when I shoot people. F.E.A.R. 2’s gore model is better. There’s more violence all-around, more blood and more gore flying around when carbon-based chumps take my bullets. The catharsis is present. It’s further augmented with small graphical overlays, like the great implementation of motion blur that gives all the firefights an injection of confusion and anarchy.

F.E.A.R. 2 also feels tighter, smoother, better and so very right. This word’s coming up a lot – feel. This vague, ambiguous term is important. Every movement, every step, every single firefight feels unique to F.E.A.R. 2 alone and F.E.A.R. 2 alone. It’s like how Mario feels so right when you control him in Super Mario World. Once all the actions in the game feel spot on, something would have to go awry to truly mess up a game. F.E.A.R. 2 does not go awry.     
 
Now that I’ve potentially wasted many paragraphs on some of the less obvious aspects of the game, it may be time to focus on the meat of the gameplay. Just like a lot of things in this sequel, the combat is different in how you go about tackling each firefight. F.E.A.R. had very subtle, tactical undertones. For all its wanton violence, slow-mo was as much of gawk-inducing show stopper as it was proper leverage against an enemy force of superior numbers. You could lean around corners to make yourself a smaller target, grenades exploded on contact and you could even shoot them in mid-air. Replica soldiers took more of a ballistic beating before they went down and they doled out a lot more damage.

F.E.A.R. 2 encourages violence in only excess, reckless maneuvers and generally being a burly idiot, running into the middle of a firefight and shooting everything that shoots back. It is more arcadey, but almost as fun as the original, albeit for different reasons. Even on the hardest difficulty, the game rarely presented a true challenge. I felt motivated to get up in everybody’s faces and fire away, as they indirectly praised my ability to move quickly and wipe out their entire squad, which only fired me up more. A great amount of weaponry is open for you dish out all this pain and explosions. Some of the favorites, like the nailgun are back and better than ever, while the particle beam sees some neat modifications that makes it unique, but still familiar. New guns include a sniper rifle, which is one of the best sniper rifles I have ever fired in a game, a flamethrower with a range of 50 kilometers and a laser gun. No gimmicks with that last one. It fires a laser and fries things. It’s great.     
 
For all the great qualities of F.E.A.R. 2’s close-quarter shoot ‘em ups have, Monolith really went above and beyond to squash one, obvious problem that plagued the first game – repetition. Levels jump around from bombed out city streets, hospitals, schools and more. There’s a better sense of pacing because of this. When I started to grow weary of the perpetually dark underground tunnels, the game suddenly launched me up into the surface. Suddenly, I could breathe the musty air, with most of it consisting of ash and cinder. Now, granted, the weariness of the underground facility affected my objectivity and I was just so happy to see more than every shade of gray, but the level design is varied nonetheless. So, the pacing’s not perfect and there are times when the game definitely started to drag, but it always managed to pick itself right up. Enemy variety is another attributing factor. You will be going against grunt soldiers for the most of the game, but every once in awhile the game presents some really great foes. The puppeteer that takes control of dead soldiers, the impressively animated wall-crawlers and the much cooler and much more awesome assassins from the original. These guys don’t appear ofte, but when they do, they’re always refreshing and welcomed. The only encounters that disappoint are the "boss" battles, which amount to nothing more than mashing keys in a quick-time event. They look great; it's very in-your-face, but to relegate these potentially exciting moments to a simple tap of a key does sap most of the dramatic tension.    

F.E.A.R. was also known for its mindtrip psychosis sequences and F.E.A.R. 2 continues that tradition. Your vision gets hazy and weird and inexplicable apparitions appear in and out of sight, distorting physical space. These never scared me, nor was the entire game scary, but they were very atmospheric and just on a technical level, damn impressive. They’re a lot more fun to go through this time around, how visually stimulating these are. There’s also two sequences where you don a power suit and they are perfect. There is absolutely nothing wrong with these two sections of the game. You man a robot that fires some of the biggest bullets in the world and fire an infinite stock of missiles. Replicas will shoot bullets at you, as you laugh at the futility of their actions. These will elicit screams of war and bloodlust.     
 
The game retains a consistent ebb and flow of combat, freaky sequence and combat, with constant and consistent alterations to those two basic ingredients. There is, however, one horrible, god awful sequence toward the end of the game. This deserves a paragraph. You man a turret and some piss-poor metal song starts playing. It is horrible, comes close to vitiating the mood set by everything beforehand. I don’t know how this got through. I’d love a patch that removes the garbage that plays entirely.

Okay, time to repress bad memories again. Oh, and there’s multi-player. The game’s most unique mode, Armored Front, is arguably the worst. It’s basically like any other capture point multi-player mode, except each side has a power suit. The only problem is you feel like the replicas that you laughed at in the single-player if you’re not in one. The mode basically amounts to seeing which power suit blows up first allowing whichever team to capitalize on their opposing side’s lack of destructive ordinance. The other, more traditional modes are better just because of the lack of robots blowing a hole into the balance. F.E.A.R. 2’s tight and smooth feel and intensity of the gunplay from the single-player rubs off onto the multi-player. It does a lot to make what is a relatively mundane multi-player mode a lot more exciting, but it won’t dethrone whatever you’re still hooked on. There are some nice ideas, like the ability to edit your loadout and spend a set amount of points by trading off medpacks for grenades, grenades for body armor and so on. These feel like a starting point for something deeper, but don’t amount to anything more.

Graphically, F.E.A.R. 2 looks leaps and bounds better than its predecessor. Textures are sharper, the guns actually have definition and personality this time, the world geometry is much more complex, the lighting is better, the shadows are better, the character models are better and yes, you get where I’m going with this. Animations are also superb; all of the guns have exceptional reload animations, enemy soldiers move and shuffle around realistically and the cut-scenes have received a huge boost in quality. There’s just the odd case with the special particle effects. It’s strange, considering how F.E.A.R. did do crazy and wild effects a whole lot better, but F.E.A.R. 2 manages to almost keep pace. Like I mentioned before, there’s a lot more post-processing and effects like motion blur that gloss over the screen, which almost gives the game that same “Oh my lord this is insane [insert loud, cacophonous scream or belching laughing here]” reaction F.E.A.R. gave me on a regular basis. Just almost, though.

Monolith’s sound team has been doing an incredible job since forever and F.E.A.R. 2 receives the same amount of detail, attention and love. All the little creaks and subtle sounds effects add so much to the mood and the bombastic stuff, like hearing a burning plane streak across the sky destroys eardrums. The music is resoundingly excellent once again, smartly reusing tracks from the first game with new tracks that fit right into the game’s musical direction, except for that piece of music. The sounds of combat are just as good and the only few complaints I have with the audio, like the less cool-sounding replica soldiers, are minimal and don’t detract immensely from what is another stunning audio package from Monolith.     
 
The single-player lasted me around 7 hours, which makes sense, because the game consists of 7 intervals, or levels. I plan on playing through the single-player again (and just closing my ears during that part) and the generic deathmatch modes were fun, so there’s some extra life in Monolith’s latest shooter.

If F.E.A.R. 2 still had the same, insane presentation of its predeccessor intact with the tightness, smoothness and unique feel this game has, F.E.A.R. 2 would’ve blown my mind. What we get is a weird trade-off. Gone are the inane sparks, the dumb physics and everything that made F.E.A.R. such an impressive display of gun porn. Whatever. What’s done is done. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is a great game and if you have an itch for shooters, F.E.A.R. 2 will scratch.