F.E.A.R. Files

"More of the same thing despite that it wasn't all that great the first time."

First a quick word:

Some of you may look at the games I've reviewed as of late and notice a pattern, that I haven't been giving either good scores or bad. The truth is that there's never a shortage of people ready to gush over the triple A titles and sleeper hits or act like wannabe Angry Videogame Nerds toward the total dreck. (Ironically I'm actually drinking a bottle of Rolling Rock as I write these words) However what you don't see enough of here on GameFAQs is guys who go out there and play the forgettable middle of the road completely unimpressive games and point them out so that you don't get suckered by the pretty box art, that's where I see myself in the grand scheme of things these days. I'm the man out there with several sheets of free rentals for Hollywood video that I got for buying various consoles, and hopefully my reviews will keep other people from mistakingly picking up a mediocre title. Anyway onto the review:

FEAR was a game that first came out for the PC some time ago, it was a game about an elite squad consisting of one coward/malingerer with an obnoxious attitude, one totally incompetent psychic and a mute super human badass killer who could slow down time and do Chuck Norris flying kicks while the two previously mentioned members treated him like their personal errand boy. If you can't guess which one of them you played as in the game you're probably pretty dense, but to make it clear you played as the mute super human badass. Their mission was to kill a crazy guy named Fettle who some people working at an aerospace corporation had decided in their infinite wisdom to grant control of an entire army of 1000 cloned chuckleheads all wearing really stupid shoulder pads.

Along the way the FEAR Team also encountered a scary ghost named Alma who liked to make people's flesh explode and light things on fire as well as knock over paint cans that happened to be near you because I guess the threat of spilled paint getting on your boots is scary or something. It was a game that essentially consisted of the same three gunfights over and over and over again interspersed with various bits of mind****ery. The gunfights were never scary, and the crazy paranormal stuff was rarely ever dangerous and the transitions between the two were about as obvious as an elephant standing in your living room unlike a game like say Eternal Darkness that was always prepared to do something strange as all hell without any warning.

I think really the most important thing to note about FEAR was despite that it was supposedly about killing ghosts you spent the vast majority of your time shooting various clones and one or two robots and not a whole lot of time actually shooting any ghosts. Also for a game supposedly about a "squad" of ghost shooting people you actually spent the entire game on your own. FEAR was ported to the 360 and then many months later to the PS3 soon after it launched, it was already starting to really show it's age with that first port to the 360.

FEAR Files is a compilation of the two FEAR expansion packs which were released for the PC since the original, interestingly neither were made by Monolith who created the original but rather by another dev named Sierra who the publisher decided to grace with the presence of this franchise. You'd never know though considering that aside from granting you some friendly NPCs and introducing a few new types of ghost, a couple of new power weapons, one new kind of soldier and a new robot there is literally nothing added by either of these expansions aside from a few more hours of shooting chuckleheads wearing stupid shoulder pads. Don't come into this expecting an expansion that adds upon an existing title such as Opposing Force did for the original Half Life, come in expecting a Blue Shift...........at most. I guess I wouldn't begrudge it for staying so close to the original in every way possible, hell I've absolutely loved more than a few cookie cutter sequels to various games. The problem is simply that I never thought FEAR was especially good to begin with, it did enough to justify it's own existence but I don't know why anyone would be excited to get ten more hours of the same old sewers and offices split between two five hour expansions let alone pay sixty bucks for it.

I think one of the first things worth notice in this case is the graphics, graphics neither break nor make a game but ugly graphics certainly aren't a plus. While I admit the dynamic lighting functions and there's lots of cool effects, destructibility and damage decals the textures look like something out of an Xbox 1 game. I am not joking, the textures are just really bland. I think it may in part have to do with the series's love of making you play the dreaded sewer levels and vaguely industrial levels that anyone who has played many games is certainly very sick of by now. Worse yet the game is simply comprised of nothing but boxy corridors, why is it that in an age where most devs have created more interesting and believable spaces that FEAR has level layouts that remind me of oldschool Duke Nukem? The original FEAR was made some time ago, it looked alright when it came out, Extraction point first arrived on the PC some time ago as well. However Perseus launched for the PC as a standalone and as part of this package I'm reviewing simultaneously and interestingly it is easily the ugliest of the three.

Story wise both games are pathetic, Extraction Point picks up at the original's cliffhanger ending and after killing every pre-existing character (including the one played by David Scully which makes me sad) ends the game at another really stupid cliffhanger with nothing added or any of the crazy stuff that's been going on explained in any more detail than what we already knew. Perseus Mandate just shows a side story about a guy who inexplicably is like the guy you play as in the original and Extraction point in every way that matters (but isn't because he's a member of a never previously mentioned second FEAR team) trying to keep up with an ever shifting list of objectives that usually consist of "walk to that place a long ways away on the other side of the area where evil guys are" as he retreads old environments (I'm serious, you literally go through several reused hunks of level from earlier parts of the series except backwards) before finally hightailing it out of the ghost infected city like any sane person would thus ending a storyline as pointless and dependent on a predecessor's as Resident Evil 3's.

The most noticeable difference to the game's storytelling in FEAR Files is now you have actual NPC allies that fight alongside you, however since every single one of them with the exception of a few completely useless unnamed guys in Perseus who just die from being weak is always killed by a scripted event it all just feels rather pointless and fatalistic. Hell there's even a part where the game tries to fool you into thinking you can save a certain squadmate when in reality whether you grab his hand and try to pull him to safety or just stand there and watch him go he dies regardless. It's insulting, it's obnoxious and frankly there is just no shock value to it the third time it happens (hell it had to have already happened more than three times in the original alone) or the ten or more so times it happens after that. Every NPC in this game may as well be wearing a red shirt because they all just die really inane scripted deaths. On the upside there are several good scares that can actually cause you to have some measure of fun, I can certainly think of one in particular involving an alleyway and another involving a hallway with vanishing walls and another that transports you to a very strange place that defies all logic.

I just can't stress enough though how the storyline from either expansion adds absolutely nothing while simultaneously killing all the characters, not that I found myself particularly caring which is really a good indication as to how bland and obnoxious most of them were. The original FEAR did actually have a pretty cool story that slowly revealed the details of a filthy and sorted conspiracy as the game progressed up to a climax where all kinds of crazy messed up things were revealed. It even managed to be fairly scary at times when it decided to properly mess with you and forgo the cheap and easy crap. Largely you learned the story by listening to people's answering machines, that mechanic does return here but very very little information is ever imparted through them.

I think it also hurts that if you've played the original you know most of the important stuff about the key players, so there's not really any proper mystique to them anymore. Toward the end I was just thinking of Fettle's ghost as a chum because he just wasn't all that interesting anymore, and I kept wondering why Alma just wouldn't leave me the hell alone because she was getting on my nerves and the only thing that hadn't yet been revealed about her was her motive for continuing to harass me.

The gameplay is carried over from the original FEAR completely unchanged, I guess in the end what it really boils down to is whether you cared for that gameplay to begin with. I'll say though that it isn't all bad, the enemies are fairly smart and constantly try to flank you, they'll say things during combat that reflect what's occurring and they'll even spot you and start shooting if they see your flashlight. The crux of the gameplay is the "reflex mode" which is your ability to switch the game into and out of bullet time for awhile whenever your "reflex meter" is full enough. It does definitely look really cool the first time you send guys flying around like ragdolls and tear up the place like you're in like in that bank lobby scene from the original Matrix. However what you will probably soon realize is that the game becomes incredibly easy whenever you're in bullet time but is arduously difficult whenever you are not. The end result is an experience that can be pretty disconcerting and lets face it doing a flying kick in a first person shooter is nausea inducing. The over the top violence tends to get a bit old as well, shooting a guy with a shotgun and having him be torn apart at the midriff and the two sides go flying back through the air about fifty feet just ends up looking more silly than it does cool, even worse when the shotgun simply causes them to explode into a cloud of blood. I mean that stuff flew back in the mid-nineties but these days it's usually seen as a total anachronism if you;re going for any level of realism.

Speaking of realism therein lies another problem with FEAR's core gameplay, the game usually tries to present itself as being highly tactical but the truth is that it's a run and gun, largely because the enemies and the player are such huge bullet sponges. It takes about half a magazine to kill most guys, much more than that to kill the player. The robots can literally take about twenty rockets to kill if you're lucky enough to find some rockets and while the launcher fires three at once that's still alot of shots, imagine if in Halo or Call of Duty if you had to shoot an enemy tank with a rocket launcher seven times before it would blow up. That would be ridiculous wouldn't it? It would take forever and would be monotonous and that's what it is in FEAR and it's expansions. The games push you more toward running and gunning than they do the implied thoughtful tactics because of the enemies and player being so resilient and if it wasn't for all the crap blowing up and flying around it would be very apparent just how shallow the core gameplay is. As for the crap flying around and exploding there's simply too much of it, it becomes incredibly difficult to see anything even right in front of you sometimes because of all the dust and detritus in the air yet the enemies are not the slightest bit hindered by it creating a fairly obvious balance problem.

One thing that's definitely quite ridiculous is the health and armor system in the game, it is basically the exact same system that existed in the original Doom. Why is it that in an age where most devs have realized that making the player hunt down health packs and bits of armor screws up the pacing and therefore moved toward a smaller regenerating health bar that the FEAR games stick to the archaic system? Furthermore why am I allowed to carry enough health packs to heal myself fully bout six or seven times? I may as well have an invincibility cheat turned on.

In conclusion though I have to say that FEAR files is not terrible, but it's not very good either. If you couldn't get enough of the original you'll probably like this, but FEAR was never a title that many people gushed over to begin with. If there was a scarcity of shooters I might even give it a recommendation but that's quite opposite of reality. The 360 is crawling with excellent shooters, do yourself a favor and look into The Orange Box, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Gears of War, Mass Effect, Halo 3 and and Rainbow Six: Vegas and only after exhausting those would I suggest even considering FEAR Files. Interestingly Monolith is actually in the process of making a true sequal to FEAR, I do think that with the right tweaks they can make something far superior to the original and to FEAR Files but we'll have to wait and see how that turns out.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/31/08

Game Release: F.E.A.R. Files (US, 11/06/07)