F.E.A.R. review

Well I finally finished F.E.A.R. a few weeks ago -thanks Mark! I'll give it back to you this weekend. I thought I would add to Mark's first thoughts from way back in November.

For the first half of the game, I played maybe for an hour a week on average because the story never captured my interest. I even threatened to uninstall the game on multiple occasions. There were endless answering machines on each level with their blinking red lights in an apparent attempt to tell the gamer the back story. After listening to the first few messages I started to hope for only one message per machine (some had as much as three). Later I played the messages but completely ignored what they had to say altogether.

Another part of the game that had me scratching my head was the occasional use of swearing from some of the characters. I don't mind it on TV and movies when it's a part of the context of the story but it really sounded akward in this game. As if the developers were trying to give the game some "street cred".

Well all was not lost when I finally got to meet the portly, Cheesy-poo loving, IT guy. This was when things started getting interesting. Finally a character to care (or hate) about! I think his name was Norman.

Anyways, the hallucinatory/dream sequences were cool, the action as the game progressed got fierce, and the ending was one of the best I've seen for a FPS.

One little detail that I liked was in the Interval 09: Incursion level. Entering a room with a radio you can listen to a DJ talking and then cut into a full 3 minute version of a real J-Pop song. Never did find out who the singer was but I'm curious if the developers got permission to use it or were just fans and threw it in as an easter egg. I'm sure they must be influenced by J-Pop culture to some degree considering the use of the Sadako/Ring character in the game.

In any case I give F.E.A.R. a B+ grade.

Now that I'm finished with F.E.A.R. I decided to install the full version of Far Cry that was bundled with my BFG GeForce 7800 card. It's a 3-year old game and it definitely shows when comparing it to today's Doom3/Half-Life 2 technology, but I always wanted to give it another try after failing to escape enemy detection in the demo version. Plus it has native widescreen support!