F.E.A.R. (PS3)
Posted by 7th on February 14, 2008

Title: F.E.A.R.
Platforms(s): Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: Monolith Studios
7th Score: 2/10

I've seen games over the course of my life that failed to live up to the pre-release hype, but never have I encountered a game that less deserved the amount of critical praise heaped upon it than F.E.A.R. This FPS lacks even the slightest hint of originality, depth, fun, eye candy, or aural diversity. It's as though a handful of college computer lab dorks decided after a Japanese Horror marathon to build their own shareware FPS, but after orders for the full version surprisingly began to come in, they were too baked to put anything new into the project, so they just repeated the first three maps again, and again, and again. And again. It's like a closed, poorly ventilated room that's been farted in so much that the same, bland fart stench permeates its core every time you enter it, to the point that you're no longer even offended, but just ambivalent about it all.

The plot of the title is a horrible, barely coherent mish-mash of stolen ideas. You have the soldier with a shadowed past who joins an elite squadron of badasses. You have the crime lords and drug dealers who are not the REAL antagonists, but more of a red herring. You have the army of genetically engineered super troopers. And to top it all off, you have Alma (her friends call her Samara) the typical long-haired female ghost-like character that's exactly like every depiction of a Yurei from every Japanese horror film released in the last 15 years.

Everything you learn as the plot predictably unwinds, you've seen somewhere else before, only told better. From Alma's secret government project bullshit to the undercover top secret Resident Evil-inspired Frankensteinian God-playing, it's all been done to death. This game's plot is the closest thing we'll ever have to a brain enema.

The controls are your typical configuration for a console shooter. The 360's version is a tad bit different due to the placement of the analog sticks, but otherwise it's the same. Of course, the PC version will get the nod from FPS purists because of the keyboard and mouse scheme, but as I said in my review of Resistance, I'm so accustomed to using a controller now that I may never go back to my PC roots, so to me it's all the same. Well. Almost the same.

The 360 version is a port of the PC original. The PS3 version, in turn, seems to be a port of the 360 version, as were many early 3rd party PS3 titles, and it shows. The controls on the PS3 version are a tad sluggish compared to the 360 version, mainly because the PS3 version's engine seems to clunk along at an unpredictable rate. Every so often the game will run at a smooth 30 fps, with enemies jumping out and bullets flying, and then you may be walking through an empty hallway and the game slows down to a crawl.

Why? It's not like the graphics are too taxing. (I'll get to that shortly.)

The weapon selection is your typical squad-shooter fare: pistols, assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, grenades, etc. Nothing new there. Even the "innovative" addition to the gameplay, the "reflex view" where you can slow time to make it easier to hit your targets, is just a dressed up rip-off of Bullet Time from Max Payne and all of the imitators that followed it, which in itself was a nod to the Matrix films. I'm not sure if F.E.A.R. was the first FPS to utilize a Bullet Time play mechanic (Resistance has a similar feature when using the sniper rifle called "Focus"), but even if it is, it's not used in any way that makes it more unique than its predecessors. In fact, the time you're alloted is so brief that it's made essentially useless. Games that have come since F.E.A.R.'s release, especially Timeshift, have used a similar feature in much more ingenious ways.

The graphics are shit. There's no easy way to say it. As mentioned above, the 360 (and the PC version, naturally) have a leg up over the PS3 version. The textures, what few there ARE, are much sharper, and the 360 version seems to do a much better job of maintaining a 30 fps rate.

The PS3 version, as already stated, just chokes along in spits and spurts. You're not really missing much though. To say this game's graphics, from guns to enemies to level designs, take a minimalist approach would be to understate the abundantly obvious. From one level to the next, you walk through bland poorly lit corridor after poorly lit corridor, killing the same five bad guys over and over again, watching the supposed Havok-based death animations go through the same three or four routines every time, and passing by so many similar doors and decorations that you feel like the level textures were designed by Hanna Barbera background artists.

Remember how Wolfenstein 3D, the first real FPS, had mostly the same wall, ceiling and floor textures? Yeah, welcome home.

The sound doesn't fare any better. The gunshots and explosions are fine, but the voice acting is just a joke. The female leader of your team is annoying to the point of distraction. You just beg for the ability to shoot her eyes out, then skull fuck her till her colon explodes our her partition. She simply won't shut. The Fuck. UP. If she were any more of a pest, she'd have a Klandathu driver's license.

The bad guys say the same five or six phrases over and over again. THROUGH THE WHOLE DAMNED GAME. "Fall back!" "Take cover!" "Target in sight!" and on and on and on. I had flashbacks to the original Berserk-esque Castle Wolfenstein game, where every Nazi would scream the same indecipherable German imperative at you just before you killed them. I had one instance where I was hiding in the corner waiting for the idiot AI routines to send soldier after soldier looking for me. I had no less than four troops come barreling one at a time around the corner and say "Target in sight, OH SHIT!" They must have changed four things in the Matrix...

Every so often you're propelled into these supposedly scary "dream sequences" where you more or less just have to move from one spot to another while ghosties jump at you, wading through halls of blood or rooms of fire, but of course then the screen flashes and you're right back where you started from, with no deeper understanding of the plot, no additional abilities learned, nothing. These sequences seem to be there just to keep you awake after trudging through the oroborus-like levels. You'll also have the same shadowy hunched over figure walk by in your periperhal vision, only to fall to ashes when you reach them, about forty bazillion times, and occasionally Alma will appear and try to fry you, or just appear in a place you just looked, like when you turn to descend a ladder. The Silent Hill games aren't scary either, but they're more chill-inducing than this bullshit. Every time I saw Alma I just craved to pull a Duke Nukem and see how much shit I could cram down her exposed esophagus.

Look. I'm sure the developers at Monolith are all very nice blokes who really wanted to make a fantastic shooter that pushed the limits of what an FPS can do. And I'm sure that someday, they may very well make that game. But F.E.A.R. is not it, and you dopeheaded fanboys who oohed and ahhed over it when the game came out need a Roddy Piper style reality check, and possibly a mighty stomp to the crotch.

This game sucks.

-=7th=-