F.E.A.R. Extraction Point

"Not as good as the original F.E.A.R., but still it is moderately entertaining"

If you have not played through the original F.E.A.R., stop reading this review now. I won't take the blame if you read and spoil that game for yourself.

I really did enjoy the original F.E.A.R., it was quite an enjoyable shooter. It seemed inevitable that they would make a sequel, considering how the original ended (the doors wide open for a sequel). However, there was some brouhaha between Monolith and Sierra/Vivendi and Monolith went off to create the true sequel: Project Origin. Sierra tapped developer TimeGate to make an expansion pack to the original. Evidently Monolith had some hand in developing this, but I am more of the assumption that they just contributed the engine, and characters. The game does manage on its principle of giving people more F.E.A.R., the problem is the game really isn't all that much better or much of an improvement over the original either. Extraction Point just serves as a good distraction, that's fun for a while, but after beating it there's really no reason to play it again.

Extraction Point picks up right at the end of F.E.A.R.; after having destroyed the Origin facility the point man is pulled onto a helicopter where Jin and Holliday talk about the destruction Origin has caused. When the helicopter loses power and Alma's teenage form climbs on board, at which point the helicopter promptly crashes. Some time later you, Holliday, and Jin come across a deactivated Replica soldier. Upon entering a church Paxton Fettel, the guy you kill at the end of F.E.A.R. is somehow still alive, and reactivates the Replica soldiers. It is never explained how he came back, because he was very much dead (a bullet in the head will do that to someone), or why the special forces didn't exterminate the deactivated Replicas, but there it is. The problem I have with the story in this game is the fact that there really isn't much of one. Sure you occasionally get the cryptic diatribes of Fettel, but that's about it. You also find out that somehow the Replicas took over the city. Sure the bits that are there are interesting, there's just so little of it that it really feels hollow. It also doesn't wrap up anything it just sort of ends.

Graphically nothing is changed, it still looks good. Of course the problem with them is the fact that nothings changed. You are still running through the same looking areas, difference this time around is that most of the time it'll be warehouses instead of office buildings. Even the subway area looks dismal, highly detailed though it may be. I really don't know what else to say about the graphics, the characters all look the same. There's one new model for the robot that looks pretty neat, however it happens near the end of the game, there is also one, count it one, new soldier type running around it looks okay enough, but at that point it was too little too late. Hell even the bloodstained areas look all too familiar. Sure the environments are still nicely destructible, and really that is what saves the graphics, mildly. Then again, it is an expansion and those aren't widely regarded to revolutionize existing graphics engines of the preceding game.

The audio is largely unchanged, sure there's some new moody instrumental music, but it is very much unchanged. The weapons still sound pretty weak, the explosions aren't that great. However, the game still does have its audio ambience set up just as perfectly as the original game. All but one of the voice actors that were in the original F.E.A.R. return in Extraction Point. I really do like the voiceover for Fettel, by the way, I don't know why I just like his voice, he carries the cryptic warnings (musings? Diatribes?) quite well. However a problem with the VO that I have is that for the most part they sound like they're phoning it in. I mean sure some of them do pull off death screams quite well, but for a most part they just sound bored. Also I'm all but certain that they just ripped the audio from the Replicas and just transplanted them into this.

If it weren't for the slow motion aspect of this expansion this game would not have been worth playing. The repeating combat set pieces, are moderately offset with the inclusion of a new apparition type of enemy and a heavy weapons Replica soldier. There's also a new robot enemy that really is there just to take more hits than the previous bipedal robot from the original F.E.A.R., it's weaponry is the same, and it does not do more damage. One thing I find amusing is the fact that they did remove an enemy from the original game. In F.E.A.R. there was this annoying flying robot, it was quite a nuisance, it wasn't hard to kill, it was just annoying as hell because of its thrice damned lasers. Another quirk that the game changed is that they gave the AI a tweak to make it smarter and more brutal in terms of their accuracy. Which I did find to be a nice change of pace. As with other expansion packs Extraction Point brings in a couple of new weapons into the fray. Added to the arsenal is a mini-gun, which is good for clearing out rooms full of baddies quickly. A laser rifle that shoots out a sustained beam of laser flavored death (unlike the other laser gun that just vaporizes the enemy to a skeleton, this can cut them in twain!). Lastly there's the turret grenades. These little buggers are handy devices that you can just toss to the ground and up comes a turret. Granted they can be all but useless as a lot of times the finicky bastards get destroyed too quickly. Also that's a problem I do have with the new weapons, enjoyable though they are. You don't actually get access to these guns until your more than two thirds through the game, and then you don't even really encounter any additional ammo for them. Which is in direct opposition for pretty much every other weapon and grenade type in this. You can't walk more than twenty steps without tripping over an abundance of SMG and assault rifle ammo, ditto for the health packs. It sort of goes against ramping up the enemies intelligence when the game makes sure your never hurting for ammo or health items. By the time I had completed this game I had max ammunition for my assault rifle, well over a hundred rounds for my shotgun, and the maximum allotment of health packs. There was a strange thing that happened throughout the game, where if you smash open a crate the weapons or whatever's contained within will actually fall through the floor. There was also the fact that often times the enemy would drop their weapons into the floor, perhaps it was just a glitch with my computer, regardless it wasn't enough to kill this game for me. Also I feel it is worth mentioning that this game is not especially long. Even for expansion pack standards, this game can easily be finished within an afternoon.

At the end of the day Extraction Point is a decent enough game. I thought it was pretty fun, if not a tad on the short side. Even if the game isn't especially challenging, and the combat is starting to feel old the horror aspect and the slow motion ability do save the game. Those and the laser rifle, but still. It is also worth checking out since you can get this, the original F.E.A.R., and Perseus Mandate together for relatively cheap.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/17/08

Game Release: F.E.A.R. Extraction Point (US, 10/24/06)