Previous F.E.A.R games have been quite repetitive in their environments and are famous for having long corridors with samey rooms and not much variation in between. So I approached this game with the feeling it would be more of the same. How wrong was I? The developer Monolith has given us a game which has a big variation in the environments and also a different style to some of the levels. Sure there is still some corridor fighting, but it is no longer just an office block with countless computer rooms all that look the same.
Some examples of the scenes you will encounter are a school, a hospital, a railway station, and the scene of a plane crash in a town. Hospitals, schools and train stations have been done to death in games and Monolith will lose a little bit for lack of imagination, however they have done the levels with such flair and detail that it would be rude of me to mark them down especially given the brilliance of some of the open levels in the game which were so much fun. In fact all of the game was fun and it is very sad that I have now finished the game as I did not want it to end.
In addition to the locales mentioned above, there are also a couple of levels where you step inside a giant mech-suit with rocket laucnhers and just stampede through the town destroying everything. You can get out of the suit at any time to gather ammo and health left behind or indeed you can do those sections without the suits but they might be quite hard to complete. There are also several sections where you use a gun turret to kill everything in sight.
One of my favourite bits of the game is where you are chasing after a spirit that keeps bringing up soldiers like puppets on string. Annoyingly fun stuff.
As with all F.E.A.R games before it, the AI in the game is brilliant and I don’t know of any game I have played yet which can surpass it. The AI will run for cover properly, they will upturn furniture to provide cover and they will crawl through spaces to get to you. They are always moving and running from cover to cover so it is sometimes diffcult to pin them down. This is where the slow motion (press Y) comes in handy. I rarely used it, however if you have a big firefight with lots of enemy moving at you at once you can press Y to slow things down and have more time to aim.
“Alma” the ghostly child returns but is older now and is a young woman and is there to provide you with the scary bits of the game. Games do not usually scare me, but if you are of a nervous disposition you might find it scary yourself. For me, the scary parts concentrated the mind and sometimes I was concentrating so much on the ghostly goings on I could hear myself breathing. In comparison to the older games, this has more weird spooky things happening than before so if you liked the previous games then this is a winner.
There is one very important thing you need to know. The demo is a slicing up of various little sections of the game. It is not a set level but little pieces of most of the levels. Personally I think because of this, it does not give the game justice as the demo is a disjointed mess with the action going from one area to another very quickly. So please do yourself a favour and do not judge this game on the demo alone, it is there to give tasters of the various action within the game but the retail version of the game is very different.
Ammo and health is aplenty on easy mode and you could get by without dying if dying is your frustration. The game took me approximately 10-12 hours to complete.
Graphically, the game is highly detailed and looks every part a current generation game. It has some amazing effects especially when it switches to weird spooky mode. The sound effects are equally as awesome and you would definitely want your speakers turned up – children and neighbours permitting.
I urge everyone to play this game. Hide behind your sofa with your Dr Who Collection if you wish, but you must play this game. Beg or borrow if you must, or if you cannot afford it now, wait until it is a little bit cheaper, but in my uneducated opinion you would be doing yourself a dis-service if you did not play this game sooner or later.
This game is amazing and is one of the best games I have played in a few years and it is clear that Monolith have taken the time to deliver an experience that is well detailed and most of all, fun to play.
EXCELLENT/10
F.E.A.R 2 Project Origin is out now in stores on Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC.
Find more FEAR 2 reviews at GameRankings and TestFreaks.
