The Only Thing We Don't Have To Fear Here Is F.E.A.R. Itself
Oh F.E.A.R. 2, you could have been so many things. You turned out to be so many things, but unfortunately so few of them are good. You placed players in the role of a new hero. This hero belongs to a new squad and with that new squad comes an almost entirely new cast of characters. Hardly anyone returns from the original F.E.A.R. and that is disappointment number one. You aren’t scary most of the time and none of your spook sequences ever amount to anything. That is major disappointment number two. However, I think a large reason for the lack of fright is because no new scare tactics were employed this time around. It’s the same jumping out of the shadows nonsense everyone was subject to in the previous F.E.A.R., and everyone has built up an immunity toward. We, the players, expect , or some freakish thing to jump at us out of the dark spaces. If you want to scare us you have to hit us with the unexpected. Add in a mechanic that makes it so that when players turn around is standing behind them randomly. Make it so that she is varying distances from the player and make one of those distance so that when players turn around Alma’s face and eyes take up the entire screen for a second and a shriek sound effect plays as she instantly vanishes in a puff of smoke. Something, anything, give us anything, but the same old same old, because the same old same old won’t work a second time around.
This is 2009. Major improvements have been made to the FPS genre in the last nine years and especially in the last four years since F.E.A.R. 1 arrived. Yet F.E.A.R. 2 plays like something from nine years ago. Rather than deliver the information players need to make sense of the story in coherent logical cut scenes, players are forced to play a game of hide of seek for PDA’s, which contain said needed information. DOOM 3 tried this back in 2004. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now. What’s worse is this completely disrupts the flow of game play when players find a PDA, because they have to step out of the action for a few minutes to engage in the painstaking process of reading. If there is one thing the entertainment industries have learned it’s that when people approach and engage in a form of entertainment they expect to be entertained. They do not want to do anything that requires active work, such as reading, and they get upset when they are forced to such things. This is why Subtitles in movies are so reviled. Beyond this however, many PDA players can see, but will have no clue on how to actually get, which keeps their secret a mystery and the player in the dark and left to wonder.
The gunplay is weak and generic to boot. Players can’t even lean and the crazy destructible environments of F.E.A.R. 1 are absent. Sure, there are things like columns and statues that are destructible within the environment, but they are few and far between and no where close to being on par with what players had in F.E.A.R 1. Other than the Asian horror elements, what made F.E.A.R 1 awesome was that every firefight in the game was like the famous lobby scene from The Matrix. Yet that element has been taken out. Why? Players can’t dual wield pistols anymore, and weapons don’t feel like they pack as much of a punch as they used to. How come? The difficulty is toned down. It’s been toned down so much so that it’s almost insulting to the player’s intelligence. Why should anyone try and play this game tactically when two of every five enemies drop health injectors when they die and there is another God Damned ammo cache and health pack around every corner? The overall presentation here is nothing more than a lackluster, brain dead, run and gun affair that fails to impress.
The story is needlessly confusing and doesn’t make any sense even when it does make sense. It doesn’t match up with the story of its predecessor in quality, or continuity. It simply presents players with one “what the fuck” moment after another while moving through a mire of random profanity and random, poorly written one liner’s such as, “you’re like free pizza at an anime convention,” and “she’s the mother of the apocalypse!”
Beyond this the original name F.E.A.R., which stands for First Encounter Assault Recon, was maintained. Just like the first F.E.A.R., there is nothing remotely close to a recon game to be found here. I’m sorry, but pairing you up with another member of your squad for a few minutes doesn’t count.
Did I mention that F.E.A.R. 2 doesn’t make any sense. The replica soldiers are back, but outside of the arena battle where you meet them it makes no sense for them to be in the game. Who, or what is controlling them after the arena? Why are they after me? If this new guy you have me playing as is the most powerful psychic alive then why can’t I use my psychic powers to control the clone soldiers that are controlled by psychic commanders and simply carry out their will? Hell, if you had that we could have a recon game. Where the player assembles squads of clone soldiers and orders them around, works with them, and kills them as he makes his way through the levels. Maybe there could be a psychic power gauge like the one in the game for the bullet time and controlling clone soldiers would drain it so you could only control them for a short time, and the more of them you control at once the faster the gauge goes to zero. Now, if that had been included F.E.A.R 2 would have been cool. It would have been advanced, and it would have moved beyond its predecessor. However, that feature isn’t there. The whole experience feels watered down and lackluster. F.E.A.R. 2 is completely unremarkable in that it does nothing to try and move the FPS genre forward and it does nothing to move the F.E.A.R franchise forward. If anything F.E.A.R. 2 is a huge step backward.
At least F.E.A.R. 2 doesn’t totally disappoint. It stays true to its forebear in having players battle the same groups of enemies in the same scenarios over, and over, and over again across seven levels that while slightly different, remain pretty much the same due to the lack of diversity in gunplay. Who cares if you are in a hospital, or a school, or a crazy underground science facility when you play through them all the exact same way. But hey, at least we aren’t stuck in the same industrial complex and office building this time around. No, you go through an extra underground science lab complex, an elementary school, a hospital, the subway, the ruined city streets of the now nuked city of , and an abandoned nuclear power plant in addition to the industrial complex and office building. All of which look great by the way and it’s nice to see there’s learning occurring somewhere within F.E.A.R. Also, the quick time events are a nice touch. When Alma, or a Crawler grabs you and you have to frantically tap the right mouse button to get rid of the horror players get a real scare and can feel the intensity. The quick time event where you kill the Colonel is amazing and probably the best moment in the game. Unfortunately, these two quick time events cover all of the quick time events F.E.A.R. 2 has to offer, and like many quick time events are over used and loose all their feeling by the end of the game. They are short lived, but incredibly sweet like the Mech sequences. They are a nice addition and very satisfying to play, but there is just not enough diversity, or length to them and they fall short like everything else F.E.A.R. 2 has to offer.
