DEVELOPER: Monolith Productions
PUBLISHER: Vivendi Universal Games
GENRE: FPS Horror
LOCALIZATION: Italian
PLATFORM: PC
Take the best FPS of 2005, a man with an unknown past and excellent military skills, a great graphics engine, a research center with unedifying ends, a little girl in the style of The Ring, a possessed soldier, a dash of horror, and you have F.E.A.R.
F.E.A.R. or (First Encounter Assault Recon).
In this game you will impersonate a team member who has been in for a week thanks to an excellent result in the drills.To be exact, your role will be that of "pathfinder" and you will have to infiltrate the headquarters of a corporation whose contact has long been lost.
But what does this corporation deal with? Basically, in defiance of international treaties, it produces enhanced clone soldiers with the special characteristic of being telepathic.
In fact they will receive orders telepathically from Paxton Fettel (the commander), a clone created solely to give orders to all other soldiers.
Fettel and his soldiers have occupied the headquarters of the guild and killed everyone inside. The mission will be to eliminate him so as to make the clones into vegetables.
But inside this building not only soldiers roam but also a little girl who by her words and actions will always keep us on the edge of suspense and the, what is going to happen? In fact, F.E.A.R. is based more on anxiety in addition to the fighting than on fear. Therefore we will alternate moments of guerrilla warfare with moments of high tension.
Let's talk about the action:
To rough up our enemies we will have at our disposal an array of weapons that includes pistols, machine guns, rifles, rocket launchers, pulverizers (ah yes!!! dust you are and dust you will return) as well as three types of bombs or grenades. In addition, since we are endowed with great skills, we will have the ability to slow down time for a few moments and attack our enemies with remarkable precision while easily avoiding their blows: this feature is called SlowMo (Matrix and Max Payne style for short).
Throughout the game we will find in addition to medikits (which can be used at any time we choose during the game) and ammunition enhancers that will allow us to increase our maximum energy or prolong the effect of SlowMo.
And what does the artificial intelligence of the enemies look like? Our opponents, the Replicas (as they will be called during the game), are able to organize among themselves and decide the best tactics to counter you, in addition to making use of covering fire, very accurate grenade throwing and use of the objects present as a shield (on more than one occasion a Replica will topple to the ground a closet or an armchair to take cover behind them), they have the characteristic of being able to know their surroundings well and use them at 100% as an offensive against you. The best thing is that by repeating a firefight if we change tactics the Replicas will adapt accordingly making the actions unique without risk of tedious repetition.
As for the variety of our antagonists, know that there are not many of them but each of them has unique characteristics that differentiate them from the others. My advice is to play and discover them little by little, you will have more than one surprise. What about the famous little girl? She is the element that will keep the tension high.
You will find out for yourself what his role in the game is in increasingly hallucinatory chilling visions.
The graphics compartment is exceptional, although the locations are few and linear (to the point that it prevents you from getting lost even if you wanted to) these will be extremely detailed. Other interesting details of the graphics engine are the water and all the light and shadow effects derived from it, and the possibility -shooting on a wall- to tear it apart and leave it full of holes.
The game also features the Havok Engine physics engine that allows us to interact with surrounding objects even if, at times, not flawlessly.
The only flaw is the management of the lights, which are excellent in quality but sometimes cause the game to slow down considerably from what has been done to make the interaction with the environments even more perfect.
The audio is excellent, starting with soundtracks that are very well suited to the time of the game and sound effects that are very well-rendered. Multiplayer is available with Deathmatch and Capture the Flag modes.
Let's cut to the chase: F.E.A.R. turned out to be the game of the year.
The game has the strength to mix purely FPS features with that healthy dose of horror and suspense that many people will appreciate right off the bat - but it's not a horror game determined to be scary, what the Monolith guys have packaged for us, it's a more subtle horror, capable of keeping the viewer glued to the monitor with eyes always wide and ears always tense.
Whether there are bloodthirsty monsters or a mysterious (barefoot) raven-haired child endowed with unimaginable powers who roams the base and manages to project fears far more terrible than anything you've ever seen, that makes no difference; what matters is that F.E.A.R. has the power to captivate and keep you glued to the end: its structure, its story, its "actors," and the choices we'll make in the game, everything is seasoned in a divine way-almost as if you were watching a movie.
And it is precisely from the films that the Monolith boys have been inspired, the more observant of you will not be able to fail to notice the many similarities that F.E.A.R. hides within it-successful movies such as The Ring or JU-ON, are just the basis of the videogames and the quotations are wasted but it is solely up to you to discover and appreciate them.
Then we have on our hands a gem visually and graphically, the excellent game engine manages to instigate even more of our fears but also our desire to play: 3D animation and scenery, although too repetitive in the long run, are still rich in detail.
The dynamic effects such as smoke, sparks (these in particular) and explosions are state of the art, and I'm not just talking about photo realistic features but also real class in the animations. Same with the 3D modeling and the movements of the characters in the game, turning all the details on full blast is equivalent to experiencing a visual orgasm (assuming you have a really bad-ass computer).
The only flaw I found is a lack of interaction with the environments, let me explain: on the one hand we have the ever-present Havok Engine that gives more and more perfect dynamics from title to title (from Painkiller to Half Life 2 to this F.E.A.R. there is always him in the way) but apart from the possibility of crumbling walls and leaving us some holes, unfortunately there is not much else left to say - some glass (in pre-determined situations) can be broken but others cannot, why? Then we have the lights and bulbs, none, even if we shoot a missile at them, will be destroyed.
Lastly, even the rag-doll of bodies has not been well taken care of: if we throw a grenade near a soldier, we will happen to see the latter smashed to pieces but if, after killing a replica, we try to rage on the dead body, even with a highly lethal dose of lead or explosions, the torso will remain perfectly unharmed-if we are really lucky, with the shotgun (which always hurts at close range), we may see a few heads or limbs blown off but no more.
Leaving aside small imperfections, I then want to dwell on the horror scenes or visions that one will see in the game: the former have a purely aesthetic factor but they still play their part and to be in a room with a murdered, half-eaten dead guy (later you will understand) and with the walls dripping with his own blood...well, it's always nice. Regarding the visions, some are relatively too brief to be metabolized carefully but others are truly chronic claustrophobia and full of extreme pathos: terrible and sublime at the same time.
In closing, I still want to say that this FEAR leaves its consequences to the game, as soon as we finish the title we would immediately like to have on our hands its sequel (it is, given the open ending, I have no trouble believing that in the future will come F.E.A.R. 2) or, at the very least, a title on par with it but for now we will have to be content with getting our hands on the only gem of 2005 in the world of horror FPSs: and it doesn't matter if the title is finished in two days scarcely or if small imperfections don't make it 100%, what really matters is that F.E.A.R. leaves its mark and does so with style.
System configuration:
- 3GHz Pentium 4 or higher
- 1 GB RAM or higher
- 128MB video card (256 is better)
- 3.5 GB of HD space
Reviewed by Marco Chelo
