Dagtastic

Creepy girl, you'll be a creepy woman soon....

FEAR 2 continues the story of Alma and her quest to make life as uncomfortable as possible for those who forcibly impregnated her in order to create an army of psychic super soldiers.   Your mission is to wander down numerous hallways, in slow motion,  in order to halt Almas seemingly unstoppable-ness.   This hell ride consists of her making the world as brown as possible, screaming, scratching at your face and….well that’s it really…brown, screamy and scratchy….oh and there are yellow flashes of light that seem to be rather annoyed with you as well.

In between you and Alma stand a countless cadre of bad guys from the first FEAR and their assorted underpowered weapons, that you will get to turn on them with little effect (thank goodness for slow motion, as it enables you to pump the rounds needed into them, and gives them enough time to stand politely, in order to allow you to pump them full of the requisite lead.)

OK, so now that we have the plot out of the way, first the good news.  The production values are top notch, if you played FEAR, you won’t be disappointed.  The presentation, sound and creepiness are all still here, and for that alone I played through this 8 hour romp hoping for a nice narrative at least.

The bad news is, once you get past the Hollywood quality presentation the game itself is a serviceable corridor shooter with woefully underpowered weapons.

One question that came to mind as I played through this was, “why am I reading the story?”.   Is it too much to ask that a state of the art title have the story presented to you through the actual game play rather than having to collect data files?  Throwing in a cheap “re-play / achievement” device really takes away from the game.  And even if you are the kind of person that likes to hunt around for things in your game….why aren’t you playing Super Mario Brothers?  At least in that game it makes SENSE that a short Italian plumber would be flying around the galaxy looking for stuff!  Besides that, getting back to FEAR 2,  how can a successful weapons development company survive so long, amass so much wealth and power, if their employees leave their top secret / incriminating data laying around in train stations and hospital hallways and school rooms?

See, this makes MUCH more sense.

FEAR 1 boasted a truly amazing idea, lets make an office building scary and they succeeded.  Not since Poltergeist 3, a movie so scary it killed its actors, had somebody made a haunted high rise story worth paying attention to.   And understandably FEAR 2 spends the first 4 hours (read half of the game)  trying to recreate that, and fails.  The level design seems tired and repetitive, with the game really not picking up until the half way point where you finally enter the city and your mech armor.  However the promise of tromping through an expansive devastated cityscape ultimately feels claustrophobic.  While it is fun tooling around the city blasting your way through wave after wave of baddies, it still plays like a hallway shooter marching from one door to the next.

The building would later fall on her...

One of the key features of the franchise is the use of bullet time.  While slowing down the action in some frantic gun battle can be fun, the player is given  so much of it, and the gun battles are so insipid, it becomes a question of  why have it at all?  Initiating this power becomes just something you do at the beginning of every firefight ultimately making an already “I just did this” feeling into something you can truly savor IN SLOW MOTION!  You may as well just take it away and make the firefight a little more interesting.

FEAR 2, by namesake, should be scary.  Unfortunately, other than the overall atmosphere of dread and creepiness which is well done,  the actual scares are far too repetitive.  The game uses the same quick time events and harmless poltergeists to give you a fright, but once you get past the fact that none of these truly scary bits can actually damage you, and the quick time events simply require you to press B repeatedly, the actual fear/panic factor completely falls apart, and just serves to aggravate the player.

What is truly disappointing  about this game is that you never really fight any of your key enemies. You spend 75% of the game chasing a soldier who, once you confront him, is killed by a the ridiculous “Press B” quicktime event, and at the conclusion of this white knuckle action ride where you get to go face to face with Alma, you literally spend it sitting in a chair.

Overall, if you enjoyed the first title in the series and simply want to continue the FEAR story, this is a solid rental. With all its faults, FEAR 2 IS playable and it’s short enough that its failings won’t completely turn you off.  And dispite my negative review,  between the boring and the brown, there are some entertaining moments that you will certainly enjoy.  If you are  FPS fan this is an average (at best) effort that should be avoided in lieu of much better games.