[typing]
Greetings and I welcome you to another Lazy Game Reviews Quickie,
this time looking at the newly released game in the F.E.A.R. series,
F.E.A.R. 3.
Or as the logo implies,
F3AR.
Uh, just to preface this a little bit,
I have played all the F.E.A.R. games.
I've played them all since the very first one by Monolith.
I also played the not-so-great expansion packs
by, uh, TimeGate Studios,
Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate.
And then there was F.E.A.R. 2, which was a couple of years ago now,
also released by Monolith, but then comes this one, F.E.A.R. 3,
which is developed by Day 1 Studios,
the same guys that were responsible for the console ports of F.E.A.R.
And I will admit that had me a little bit concerned
because I had no idea how they would take this.
But thankfully, they haven't completely ruined the game.
Another couple of names to throw out there:
John Carpenter, he worked on the cinematics this time around,
and also Steve Niles, who is a comic book writer and such.
So there is a bit more of a noticeable flair to the cinematics and the story.
In fact, there is sort of a story that you can follow along now.
I've never really noticed before in the F.E.A.R. games.
That's because I don't play the F.E.A.R. games for a story.
I play the F.E.A.R. games to blow away things in ridiculous ways
with very awesome weapons,
as well as to take advantage of the bullet time,
which is explained as very fast reflexes of Point Man.
It's pretty much brought all of that back except
it's been extremely consolized.
And what I mean by that is that a game that was originally a PC title
has really had a lot of "console-itis" kind of things thrown in there.
And not just console titles, specifically, I mean modern shooters in general.
I'm not a big fan of all this stuff like
an actual cover system.
Basically, it's a shoulder magnet button.
You click on a cover and, augh, you're up against it
and you can peek out from behind the edges and shoot people.
The F.E.A.R. games have never had that. I never thought they needed that
because you have this bullet time mode which you can just use at any time,
and blow away all the bad guys in ridiculously hideous ways.
It was basically a crutch. I don't know why it needed a cover mechanic.
The game is a lot harder now, I think,
so maybe it's a good thing, maybe it's not.
The big problem that I have with it, though, is the checkpoint system.
Now there are no longer any kind of
quick save options or quick load options.
You ONLY have checkpoints.
There IS no other way around it, and I HATE that
because the checkpoints on this one don't make any friggin' sense.
If your checkpoint system works, I can get over that.
That just saves me the hassle of having to press F5 and F7 or whatever on the keyboard.
But if they don't work,
if the checkpoints are in completely illogical places,
then I'm sorry, but that sucks.
I mean, these are long levels. Think 30 to 50 minutes each,
and there's not exactly a bunch of save points thrown in there,
so it really gets annoying.
Because the game can be very unforgiving.
And that's part of the appeal of the game or me,
as well as the overall nastiness of the violence.
Shooting people is just fun.
They've brought back the F.E.A.R. shotgun, the machine guns,
the rail gun thing that shoots spikes and stuff.
The energy weapons that just zap an enemy to pieces and blow 'em up and set 'em on fire
and all that stuff, it's here.
And the great environments have returned from F.E.A.R.
and quite a few of I'm very, very fond of.
I'm liking the fact that there are places
like a Sam's Club type of big chain store,
a housing development, industrial type of places,
all those kind of really awesome locations that I love to shoot up in the F.E.A.R. games
and then see blow up in slow-motion. It's great.
There's also a lot of new enemies now, some of them are pretty frantic.
It feels like I'm playing Left 4 Dead or Serious Sam sometimes.
It gets very, very intense,
and I'm very much liking that.
There's a bunch of other little things,
but I'm not really going to go into them because I haven't explored them.
Things like playing through the game again
as Point Man's weird demon brother guy, Paxton Fettel.
You have like spirit powers that you can use, I guess.
That doesn't really appeal to me that much.
There's also online multiplayer modes,
which are just kind of take it or leave it for me.
Although there's supposed to be some interesting additions,
like almost showing up in the middle of the match
to screw things up and stuff,
which is kind of cool.
You also have the ability to play with two players
through the campaign co-op,
which really sounds kind of interesting
and if I find somebody that would like to play with it, I'd like to give it a try.
So overall, F.E.A.R. 3 is a pretty solid experience.
It's decent, the graphics look good, the gameplay is good.
It's not up to the standards of F.E.A.R. 1 in my opinion,
but it's definitely a fun shooting experience
and it's disgusting,
and I can appreciate that.