Posted January 12, 2006
It had to happen sometime. I had to burst from the anachronistic shell of my current computer and emerge on the other side as a bedazzling butterfly filled with all the radiance that a million gigahertz of "Front Side Bus" (whatever that is) and two million gigahertz of "RAM" can provide. Putting a disposable income in front of someone like me is just asking for trouble. I made a good show of depositing money in the bank for a good couple weeks, but we all knew how it was going to end up. I'm just going to justify the purchase by saying that this computer is essentially $1050 I can not spend on beer. It's not a lot, but it helps me sleep at night.
So get this: please understand that I haven't been much of a computer gamer since stuff like 486s and Pentium 90s were all the rage. I guess the last game I played on a computer that was legitimately my own, aside from a brief flirtation with Final Fantasy XI (our relationship ended just like the game ran on my machine: poorly), was my oft-mentioned Deus Ex. Holy jeez was that game good! This past year I had a friend's computers available to me for long enough to try out games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3, one of which I thoroughly enjoyed and the other was one of the more boring (though pretty!) things I have ever experienced in videogame form. I'll let you guess which is which.
One of the reasons for the construction of my new box of hardware was that certain game called FEAR. Us console gamers have long been privileged in that basically anything that comes out in the survival horror genre is limited to our black and grey boxes that sit under the TV. This was a relationship I found all too comfortable, as I will always prefer sitting in a couch with a controller in my hand to hunching over a desk and manipulating twenty different doodads at once. Even games that probably would've been better off STAYING on PC (that is: Martian Gothic) eventually wound their way down the bumpy trail and deposited themselves right in the lap of the eager Playstation owner.
I'm not saying FEAR -- an action FPS without even a single molecule of the 'adventure' that so many recent games are trying to inject into the genre -- can be 100% legitimate in ascribing the survival horror title to itself, but it sure does a great job of trying. What we have here is a new genre, like an "FPS Horror" that actually manages to be somewhat scary (unlike Doom 3) and gets bonus points for not completely sucking in almost all major categories Call of Cthulhu.
FEAR plays mostly like any other first person shooter with just a few quirks (like slow motion and leaning around corners) to show that it's a modern day game and not just a rehash of Doom 2. You have your shooty guns, a variety of melee attacks (though they're rarely used, there are few things more pleasurable than bicycle kicking a soldier in the back of the head), and someone was even intelligent enough to map grenades to a different button instead of giving them their own weapons category. For all its coolness and fun, I don't understand why the Half-Life series can't figure out how to do that. Anyone who's ever played an FPS will need little instruction on the workings of FEAR. Your objectives are to 1) find the enemies and 2) dispose of them in violent manners. There are no significantly extended cutscenes, no robust inventory system, and not a single, solitary statistic to memorize. Look at the bad guys, shoot them, enjoy.
But FEAR can not be described as your ordinary shooter! Instead of facing off against titanic bosses or "scientists gone wild", your primary foe is a psychic lieutenant named Paxton Fettel. Fettel is part of a super secret cloning program that would allow a commander to telepathically control a thousand genetically engineered soldiers with but a whim. I think you can guess where this is going. Our boy Fettel, for reasons better left unspoiled, whacked out one day and started eating people. It's your job as a new recruit of the FEAR unit to lay waste to dozens of these psychically controlled troopers whilst trying to uncover the mystery of what made Fettel go off his rocker.
It's certainly one of the more unique story setups I've ever read, but I might not be learned enough in the field of cannibal supersoldiers to make that sort of judgment.
As a FEAR (the awkwardly named First Encounter Assault AND Recon squad) operative you are equipped with a variety of weapons to get your job done. As is to be expected from these games, your unit sees fit to furnish you only with a pistol at the onset of your first mission. Soon a submachine gun gets added into the mix and from there it's just fun on top of fun. Though certain really cool weapons (the precision rifle) are chronically unusable due to their almost nonexistent ammo supply, there are few firearms in the game that the average player won't enjoy using to riddle the corpses of his enemies. Ammo conscious players like myself will probably find themselves sticking to the rifle and shotgun, as those are the most amply supplied weapons, but they provide no less joy than some of the more exotic munitions. The nail gun and the repeating cannon are personal favorites for sowing disarray amongst your cloned foes. Having three different types of grenades isn't a bad deal either. In FEAR, the joy of the firefight comes simply from shooting your weapon, it generally doesn't matter WHICH weapon.
See, someone on the development team had the bright idea to throw all weapon accuracy into the toilet for this game. Far from being a bother, this writer actually went gaga over the ample excitement provided by shooting off dozens of rounds into enemy hiding spots, accompanying his playing with hoots and hollers that added significantly to the amusement of friends and roommates in the vicinity. Aiding the wanton carnage is the fact that almost every weapon in the game (even the shotgun) can fire basically as fast as you can pull the trigger. By the end of a small engagement the player is bound to be in a dust covered room, plaster strewn everywhere from rampant automatic fire, using his flashlight to try and peer just an inch further through the smoke and confirm that everyone involved is now pushing up daisies. The moment when that is not the case, like a sneaky soldier diving off a catwalk, is what FEAR is all about. I'm not ashamed to say that I've jumped more than once after a burst of gun fire came out of nowhere while I was trotting my way through a blood-spattered room.
It only gets creepier when the invisible stealth ninjas start running up behind you and ganking you in the kidneys!
Aside from the thousands upon thousands of bullets you will expend while playing this game, the other part of the equation that makes the action so downright enjoyable is the AI. With the quality of enemy FEAR boasts, the rest of the game could've been comprised solely of doggy poo and it still would've been halfway decent. Half-Life 2 was touted as having some pretty solid artificial intelligence, but FEAR blows it so far out of the water that the former game's Combine troopers might as well be the brain-dead schlubs from last year's disappointment Doom 3. The clone soldiers of FEAR, your most frequent foes, will dive behind obstacles, kick over cabinets to hide behind, and, my personal favorite, jump over railings while you're not looking and try to flank you. These are not scripted events like you might find in other FPSes, a simple reload of any given gun battle will show the enemy reacting a dozen different ways. Aside from some strange moments where soldiers unaware of your presence will stare at the dead bodies of their comrades a bit too long, there is nothing to complain about with regards to FEAR's AI. It's a masterpiece, probably the best thing the game has going for it. In a game like this, one with so many positive traits, that's a high accolade.
Where story is concerned FEAR's main plot could stand to be a little less derivative, but it's an enjoyable yarn all the same. Yes, the girl on the cover that looks like she's from The Ring acts a whole heck of a lot like the girl from The Ring, but it's not really in these moments that FEAR draws its greatest horror appeal. The scariest bits are when the player is hiding in a corner, crouched down and waving his flashlight from side to side to try and catch even the briefest glimpse of the stealth soldier attacking him, or the jump scare of absentmindedly shooting a bloody bit of drop ceiling only to have a very dead body fall right into your lap. One of the most nerve wracking moments in the game can be trying to listen to laptop feeds or answering machine messages in darkened rooms, unsure of whether or not the noise is going to attract the attention of clone soldiers or other creepy-crawly things. The atmosphere of an empty office building at night is gut wrenching enough in and of itself, the addition of camouflaged covert ops agents hunting for your pancreas only makes one's teeth chatter all the more. In my experience rarely, if ever, are you going to be attacked while the exposition is running, but the thought of it wracks my nerves all the same.
And it's the good kind of nerve wracking, not the kind that makes you all upset and compounds ulcer upon ulcer into your already terse stomach lining like so many other games are fond of doing. It's the sort that makes you want to kick down every door you see, that causes you to lean ever so slightly around ever corner for fear of an ambush waiting around the bend. FEAR is a game that knows how to build tension. It does it in cheap ways, with flash appearances of the little Ring girl and ghastly voices in dank sewer pipes calling out from beyond the grave, but it never really brings anything to the table that's going to make you lose any sleep. It's not exactly The Shining, but FEAR knows its role and certainly does it better than the last eight Jason movies. Sometimes a series of cheap jump scares, like cabinets falling over or strange beings scuttling around just out of the reach of your flashlight is all you really want from a game.
My complaints with the game are few and far between. The enemies are somewhat repetitive, with only four or five distinctly different types of bad guys (however most of them have two or three divisions of their own), but I'm more concerned with how smart they act than I am with demanding yet another palette swap. I think I've passed the point in my life where a game's quality is defined by having red, green, AND purple versions of the same enemy. Last year's Half-Life 2 pitted us against nearly identical Combine soldiers for the majority of its run and nobody really seemed to give a hoot about that. The only other major flaw is that some of FEAR's characters are needlessly profane. So much of one major player's dialogue is peppered with "MF"-this and "bitch"-that and after awhile it really starts to detract from the mood. It doesn't help that the character in question is your main point of contact with the outside world, so he's sort of one of the most vocal ones in the game. This might not be as much of a point of contention with you as it was with me. I guess I'm just old fashioned, not in with the hip dudes of the gamer subculture. Either way, two minor quibbles is basically nothing when compared to the heap of boring movie licenses and sports rehashes that populate gamestore shelves these days.
I don't know what provided the original impetus that caused me to splurge on a brand new computer, but I'm sure as heck glad FEAR was around when my box got pieced together. Few games can encapsulate the kind of gestalt simplicity that FEAR shows and still be enjoyable, much less playable, but FEAR embraces its easygoing "kill or be killed" game mechanics and runs with it. It won't leave you scratching your head or holding a box of tissues at its end, but I could think of much worse ways to spend seven or eight hours. FEAR is cathartic gameplay at its finest. It's not the sole reason to upgrade your gaming rig, but it's a great kick in the right direction.
