First, let me get this off my chest: F.E.A.R. 2 – Project Origin for the PC (which is what this review is based upon) requires Steam. That is, requires an internet connection to play. There is absolutely NO label on the game’s box whatsoever that mentions this. This means that if you are going to install this game on a computer that doesn’t have Internet, forget it. Not that it’s a problem for most gamers out there, but to cater to a wide audience of potentially clueless new gamers, that is pretty bad marketing. The only hint is that “Steamworks” is mentioned in the back of the box in line with a bunch of other involved companies, but just a simple name won’t mean a whole lot to some people.

F.E.A……ugh…screw it. FEAR 2 is the first true sequel to the original 2005 hit. While the expansions of the original did continue the game…it didn’t really continue the story. The first expansion, Extraction Point, continued from where the first game left off. But never went anywhere. The second expansion, Perseus Mandate, was more of a spin-off with the story running parallel of the original and had you play as a different voiceless (again) character with a different team.

FEAR 2 has you play as the super elite gun-toting, Matrix Bullet Time moving operator Michael Beckett…..who unfortunately also seems to lack the somewhat absent in the FPS gaming world powers of speech. But hey, at least you have a name now, so at least we’re moving up! If you played the game’s demo, you might be surprised that that level is nowhere in the game…at least not in it’s entirety. What you were playing was actually a pre-designed level for the demo only that seamlessly connects different levels of the actual game together. You get a more broad sense of the entire game without spoiling too much and not just the first two levels.

Sadly, the story is the weakest part of the game. Because most gamers now know just who exactly Alma is, the suspense and mystery of it all is now gone. Rest assured, the game does continue the game’s storyline quite well, like revealing Alma’s past, but only ends just as sudden as the first game, leaving you with even more questions. Here’s hoping for a FEAR 3. (Considering the ending, they better have us play as the same character in this game.)

The scares are a real treat. Now I know many people have different ideas on just exactly what is scary, and say game’s like this don’t scare them. But people react to being scared in different ways. If something scary happens and you don’t scream, jump just a little, or not move at all but felt even the slightest tingling sensation running down your back, sorry pal…you were scared. If NONE of the random scares get you in any way, then you’re either blindly rushing through the entire game, watching TV while playing, or have lost all feeling inside you and not even death scares you…..or so you claim. There’s the usual “boo” moments, and then there’s moments will the game will constantly assault you with your HUD glitching with static, split second images of Alma appearing, as well as other ghosts that appear in random spots until you crawl to a rocking fetal position sucking your thumb. Okay seriously though, if I wanted to play a scary game, I’d play a Silent Hill or Fatal Frame game. Even if just the initial BOO scares me, I can’t say I’d be scared for very long after that considering that I’m a solider that is carrying a sub machine gun, an assault rifle, a rocket launcher, and several delicious flavors of grenades. I’m surprised Beckett moves as fast as he does. Even if the actual scares don’t scare you THAT much, it’s the actual events that trigger these things that are creative. A lot of the time the game will throw something scary at you in front of your face, but that’s not always the case. One of the game’s favorite scare tricks lies in the level design and crescendo timing. Some of the areas that trigger scares are optional, but the game makes sure you go there anyway by plopping weapons or medkits there. The game does a good job of forcing you to look in one direction and then silently (and if your comptuer is fast enough, “load-lessly”) spawning something behind your back when you turn the other way. (The demo has an example of this, if you desire a taste.) Sometimes there is an audible cue…like a musical string, that will make you slowly turn around with anticipation…and sometimes… no cue at all. There’s something that screams “clever” when you find yourself looking at something quietly when you notice someone was staring at you the entire time with the corner of your eye. All without even turning around. Hearing a soldier’s chatter after a serires of spooks actually sounds calming. Unforuantely, the scares become almost non-existant halfway through the game, like the desingers were rushing near the end.

The game’s graphics are decent. It’s definitely not the next Crysis, in fact a lot of the textures are quite blurry, but this should only bother you if you are purposely looking for all the game’s flaws. Great graphics doesn’t make a good game…but it helps. Even though the game’s graphics isn’t exactly up to today’s standards of excruciating bump-mapped detail, it may be a blessing, because the system requirements isn’t as demanding as the first one. The first FEAR was a total system hog, and many players were forced to tone down the settings a lot, or just not play it at all. The one thing that does seem to be a big no no is that the game does not have widescreen support. You can change to a widescreen resolution, and it does change, but it also shows it in letterbox format. I’m playing a game here, not watching a movie. (And even with movies, letterbox is supposed to simulate widescreen, so why do I still get bars with a widescreen TV? GTA San Andreas did it.)

The sound is a mixed bag. Most of the guns sound like they should be, but don’t expect your speakers to be booming. Voice acting is good, although one character I feel seems to overact a bit near the ending. Also, at least from what I could tell in the campaign, turning down the SFX volume not only turns it down, but it also seems to turn down the distance you can hear things period, not just make it softer. I turned it down to about halfway once because I couldn’t hear the dialogue, and I noticed I couldn’t hear soldier’s guns that were no more than 15 feet away. Somehow, it reminds me of all STEAM game’s that use the Source engine, where gunshots from within very close distance to you are just as loud as gunshots miles away.

Most of the game’s standard guns are still here, such as the sub machine gun, assault rifle, and combat shotgun, and all fire just as lovely as they did in the first game. Everyone’s favorite Penerator has been renamed to the Hammerhead, although reasons for this I have no idea, it too is the same, I think. The ASP rifle is now nowhere in the campaign, only in multiplayer. The pistol can now no longer be dual wielded. The punching, drop kicks and sliding is back, as well as your slow-mo ability is, only now targets light up like you were on acid. The slow-mo tends to make things a tad easy, however. The PC game also has it’s own version of XBOX Live achievements, called “Awards.” These “Awards” are done through different actions through single player and multiplayer. I quoted “Awards” because the game seems to misuse the word. When you do anything of these things the game says “Award Unlocked!” I got excited, and checkd my awards list…….I was “awarded” nothing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I do think an award usually means something of value, in this case maybe a cheat code or something, but apparently all I did was accomplish a task, or in FEAR’s case, I “awarded” a task. I guess because PS3 now uses “Trophies” they had to improvise. The game also uses a console style auto-save feature, so you can’t save your game anywhere, not even quicksave. The game’s save points are frequent, but that also means it shows a huge “SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER” window every 10 minutes, something that just completely ruins the atmosphere when your hearing voices and your character is breathing heavily in fear. A simple small disc spinning icon or something would of sufficed.

Enemy AI pretty good, as it was in the original. Enemies take cover, blind shoot, throw grenades and will try to flank you. The level design has many different objects for you to take cover behind and pathways for the AI and you to take, so the replay value should be good in this retrospect. Others would feel that the AI is stupid, but there is a difference between “good” AI and “difficult” AI. Most shouldn’t have too much of a problem on standard difficulty, only there is now only three difficulties instead of four. Other than the soldiers, those pesky near invisible ninjas are back, with electrocuting melee attacks. New to the series are weird freaks with a severe bad case of epilepsy, and somehow lack the ability to walk on two legs. Both the ninjas and those freaks are damn near silent when approaching you, so pay attention.

You can now hold up to four weapons at at time instead of just three. In liu of that however, you can now only hold three medkits instead of ten. To make up for this, enemies randomly drop mini health injectors that heal you on the spot (you can’t take them with you) for a small pick me up. There are also a few segments where you get to man a gun turrent and a giant robot/armor/mech thing as well. While the mech armor is fun, I was disappointed that the turret sections had you remain stationary, and there is no way to take cover from bullets. I like car chase scenes, what can I say. I noticed a glitch with the robot as well. Every time you enter (or leave) the mech, your weapon loadout seems to be scrambled. For example, what was in your first weapon slot is now in your fourth slot. Hopefully this inconvenience is fixed with a patch, witch this game seriously needs, mostly due to it’s multiplayer problems……..

Mutliplayer has you select between three loadouts which you can customize, based on a point system. Different weapons, armor and items all have a point value, and when you use up all those points, you can’t equip anymore items. You can only have up to two weapons, one medkit if you want to spend the points on it, and whatever points left is usually put into grenades. You can no longer use slow-mo in multiplayer, which may be a good thing considering the first FEAR game where whoever had the slow motion ended up winning all the time. Gameplay modes are your standard deathmatch and team deathmatch. Others modes include Control, which is three control points to capture and hold which accumulate points over time. Armored Front is like Control but with five control points that must be captured in a linear sequence, and with the robots thrown in. (One per team.) Failsafe is a bomb defuse variant. Counterstrike lovers will be at home here, as well as gamers accustomed to specatating more than playing, as this game mode has no respawn. The last is Blitz, which is FEAR’s 2’s version of Capture The Flag, or PHLAGs in this case. (PHosphoLuminescent AGent.)

The game’s multiplayer brings nothing new to the table, however, this is only because everyone’s standards have gotten higher. FEAR was and probably will stay a corridor shooter, with it’s map design always putting in very close quarters combat. This is not a game (single or mutli) where snipers will rule the day because the whole game is wide open spaces. (Although there is a sniper rifle.) The game does have open spaces, but nothing upon the likes of Crysis or Farcry. So if you prefer maps with close quarter combat indoors, this is right up your alley. No having to line up a very small dot upon other small dots while hiding in the grass. The game has a maximum of 16 players per server, which I hope is due to the small map design and not because..dare I say it….dumbing it down for consoles. Still, having actually living for more than 30 seconds per life becuase theres an an enemy player around every frikin corner in a 32 or more player server is a breather. The game sports a Call of Duty style of spawning, in that you always spawn next to a teammate, so you can always expect friendly company by your side. What I do miss however is the embedded team mate names. In the first FEAR, not only could you see teamates names over their head, if you were to stand right up next to someone behind them, you could see the player’s name printed on the back of his clothes, like a S.W.A.T team. The names weren’t just sloppy floating text-overs either, it literally became part of the character’s model. This small attention to detail helped me feel like I was really in a team, despite them actually being miles away from me.

What isn’t a good this game’s lack of muliplayer support. For one, you can’t check your own ping, yet you can see everyone elses. Whoever thought that this is a good idea needs to be kicked in the head. The pings aren’t even numbers, they’re icon sized graphs that are either green or red. The letterbox format for widescreen resolutions is still there, as if someone thought that there was some kind of cinematic storyline in multiplayer. (Tensions on noobness and eliteness don’t count) Melee attacks are no longer one hit kills, so running up to someone to lay the smack down might be considered suicide. Dropkicking and sliding is a different story however, but you have to set yourself up for it. Since slow-mo is gone, being Neo is a bit out of the question. The lobby’s interface where you choose your loadout, converse, and change game options inbetween rounds is aboslutley atrioucious. It bases around sliding windows back and forth, windows that deal with game options, chat, and everyone’s score, and half the time chat window either pulls up halfway, or not at all. Pressing Tm which allows you to chat seems to not work every other round, even when you have the chat window in your face. The functionality of the entire interface is just simply inconsistent. It seems to be based upon a 5 second delay inbetween rounds when the interface is locked, and then finally shows the round result, then unlocks, but other times after the 5 seconds I still couldn’t click certain things.

Upon release date, Steam already patched the game to 1.1, however, half of the server list have servers with version 1.0. That’s right, this game has already been bootlegged, which is a piss on all hard working people. Piss on all you losers who don’t have the mental capacity to work fast food. The game also gives you the choice of playing between unranked and ranked servers. The community ufortuantely seems to favor unranked servers, but I can’t exactly blame them: There is really only anywhere between 2-4 ranked games going on at one time…despite there being over 90 pages of leaderboards. Strange? Yes, but I digress, as there isn’t any real reason to play ranked anyway. As told from devlopers, playing in ranked matches lets you gain XP which suppoisgnly increases your rank, or level up. I don’t see this feature anywhere. If this is supposed to increase the amount of points I can spend on equipment, or unlock new equipment, I don’t see the point, since I seem to have access to everything from the start. (Unranked or Ranked.) I don’t see any XP gains when I kill people in multiplayer, and get this…nor do I see anywhere to even “see” my rank. There’s no button anywhere that displays my status. The only way see to do this is do look through the 90+ pages of leaderboards to find my name, (which shows kills, deaths, etc.) and I”m not even sure if that’s a full list. And speaking of statistics, would it kill the industry to make assist kills standard in FPS games? I’m sick and tired of pouring in all my bullets onto a target only to have another teamate appaer out of nowhere and getting the last bullet in, negating any work I did and giving all points to him.

And quite possibly the most inexcuseable is the game not coming with any dedicated server files. Yes, you read that right. It took me a while to figure this out, but after asking around, I found out Monolith did not release any way to host a deciated server. What is this, 1998? Furthing asking around and I found out the first FEAR didn’t have dedicated server files either, but only upon release. They were added later. Having no dedicated server for multiplayer games today is like buying a car with no tires. I totally agree upon the phrase “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke,” but this is taking it way too literal. Oddly enough, the game has a “Ignore empty game servers” filter, but with no deicated servers, tell me how that is going to be useful?

I’d be lying if I said the multiplayer isn’t broken. Well, it isn’t, it’s got everything a good mutliplayer FPS has, and it has only expanded upon the first FEAR, and THAT game scored well, but what it doesn’t have in funcitonality is EXTREMELY needed.

FEAR 2 is mostly more of the same game from the oringial. Monolith has followed the golden rule of not fixing anything when nothing broke, however what they did “fix” is it’s multiplayer. The amount of servers is very low. Growing slowly, but surely. But the real question is, what is the peak amount? I’m sure most of the problems will get fixed with patches, but when you have many different game companies competing with each other, the condtion of a game during it’s release is most important. I don’t care if the next patch completly saves the game. Patches take a while to release, and by the time even the first patch comes out, most people will of lost interest. (Saint’s Row 2 for PC, I’m looking at you.) Multiplayer is usually the never ending life of a FPS game if it has a very short campaign, but when you don’t support it well, the players won’t support you either with it’s sales.