"Nowhere near as cool as it pretends to be."

F.E.A.R tries to elevate the first person shooter experience to cinematic levels by including a story full of wearing, cliched dialogue, typical and incomprehensible B-horror mystery, gallons of bloodletting and severed members everywhere and cheap scares that hardly scare no one, which is why it fails miserably.

Plot:
Despite the annoying self-importance the game exudes once installed, the first couple of minutes of gameplay were rather interesting and creepy, so I was going to give it credit for trying, but once everything started to became progressively incoherent and the initial cheap scares remained so cheap I told myself I was being way too naive.

In the end the only redeeming quality here is the atmosphere, which is quite oppressive and sometimes even a bit (and only a bit) scary, everything else is just gibberish, there is no way to put together the dialogue, cut scenes and small bits of story simply because they have nothing to do with each other, they just want you to think there is something important and interesting going on here.

Graphics:
The graphics are definitely tough to rate because the system requirements are so high I doubt there is a PC capable of running this game at its fullest. F.E.A.R is so overstuffed with small details like papers and chairs (just to mention a few) flying through the screen every time we shoot a table that even NASA`s supercomputers would have trouble running this title. Honestly, they could have invested in (much) more different environments, enemies and weapons instead of fancy but useless details.

Music:
As for the music, well, something that never ceases to amuse me is how everyone talks about how incredibly good the soundtrack is in games that virtually have no music at all, like this one. I don`t know what is your idea of music, but a couple of spooky sounds here and there every ten minutes or every time something mildly amusing happens certainly isn`t my idea of real music.

However, the reason why I bother to rant about this is that most gaming publications seem to specially fond of this game`s soundtrack. IGN says the game has ``gorgeous music`` and Gamespot gives it a ten out of ten in the music department, in my case I cannot rate the music because, simply put, there is not enough to rate anything.

The voice acting on the other hand is absolutely brilliant, but I guess that that is hardly a surprise, I can`t remember the last time I played a FPS with bad or even mediocre voice acting.

Gameplay:
At first F.E.A.R plays like a profane, sadistic and pretentious version of Half-Life without aliens, even the place we start playing is kind of similar, but once we find out that the plot is an absolute mess and get used to the incredible visuals and stylish designs we`ll find out that, overall, F.E.A.R is just another ephemeral, run of the mill FPS.

So, it should come as no surprise that the game is way too repetitive, specially towards the end, which is not a very smart move definitely. As expected, dark corners and pitch black locations abound and the number of different enemies we have to deal with leaves a lot to be desired.

The weapons blow except for some kind of laser gun that reduces enemies to skeletons and the pierce gun, but they are practically useless due of the lack of ammunition, which is alarming by the way. We run out of ammo in the blink of an eye and while it is rather easy to find bullets for our two classical machine guns and the shotgun, it is still a real pain.

There is a strange slow-mo feature similar to Viewtiful Joe`s or Max Payne`s (from what I`ve heard, I have never played Max Payne), but it is so useless I haven`t even used it, save for a couple of times to see what it looked like. And it is not that it wears thin after a while, it is simply pointless, yet another example of style over substance.

The enemies` AI is tremendously high, way too high sometimes if you ask me. One thing I`ve learned after playing so many FPS is that I prefer myriads of idiotic enemies rather than small groups of intelligent ones, like Goldeneye, that way the difficulty relies on the huge number of soldiers and it is ten times more fun. In this game the enemies are constantly hiding, crawling and jumping, not to mention they are more resistant than Swarzzenegger in Predator and Commando combined so dealing with them is often more tiring than fun.

Finally, what a surprise, the single player mode is stupidly short, although its difficulty and monotony make it seem longer than other stupidly short FPSs. In terms of multiplayer options, from what I have read they are nothing worth praising, but I`ll never know since I rarely play online.

Overall:
F.E.A.R looks like a very stylish and important and cool title while it is nothing but pure pretension. Anyway, pretentious, repetitive and incoherent as it is, it is not a bad game at all, but I wouldn`t waste my time looking for it unless you suddenly find it installed on your PC and ready to play, I got bored before finishing it and only bothered to complete it one day I had absolutely nothing interesting to do.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/28/06