Good day, and here we have FEAR, or First Encounter Assault Recon, an FPS released in
2005 by Monolith and published by Sierra.
Ah, sierra...
How I miss thee.
But anyway.
FEAR is an interesting FPS.
It tries to be a mixture of first person action with horror elements.
And it both kind of works and kind of falls flat.
Seemingly the game was created by two people; one person wanted a horror FPS and one person
wanted a sci fi FPS, and then they sort of mixed the two together to varying results.
Now, the game can be scary.
But the scary elements are mainly just relegated to freak out moments - it's where your character
kind of freaks out and sees disturbing imagery that doesn't really have much of an impact
on the game itself.
Sure, during some of these freak out moments you can be attacked, but it's very rare and
really, it just sort of comes out of nowhere.
And I guess that would be scary, but it comes off as more annoying because you don't know
which freak out moment will actually have things that can hurt you.
Now another thing going for this game when it comes to horror is the fact that the main
villain is a creepy little girl that is basically an Eldrich abomination that no one can stop,
even if you detonate a nuke right on top of her she can just sort of teleport herself
out of there.
That can be scary but she doesn't really do anything to you.
She just sort of tries to creep you out, I guess, even though in theory she should just
be able to vaporize you with her mind.
Really, the main enemies you fight in this game are just cloned soldiers.
See, that's where we're getting into sci fi FPS territory.
You gotta fight clone troopers.
And I don't show it here, mainly to avoid spoilers, but yes, you will fight power armoured
soldiers.
Not really horror based there, I'd have to say.
Really, first person shooters today, and when this game came out, weren't really scary,
and I think that's mainly because it's kind of hard to make them scary at this point.
First person shooters are really nothing new.
You see, back when they were new, you could actually scare people with them.
Doom, for example.
We all look at that game as just a run and gun FPS, but back when that came out, it was
pretty bloody scary because no one had ever seen monsters that realistic before.
Quake is another good example; you never saw monsters that realistic before and you never
saw an atmosphere that creepy before.
But here, though, it's just another first person shooter.
Oh no, it's a creepy girl who's just.... walking around.
Really, you're not going to be that scared by this game.
I suppose if this is your first playthrough and it's late at night you might get a little
scared by it, but really, there's only one or two jump scares that are actually effective.
And the atmosphere, while good, just does not convey a sense of creepiness when you're
fighting some powered armour with a rocket launcher.
It just doesn't work.
Now the graphics for this game are really very good.
This was probably one of the best looking games of 2005.
Everything is highly detailed, all the enemies look really good - and the enemies actually
have good AI.
They know how to go to cover, they can actually crouch and crawl under things, and that's
really this game's main strength.
The AI is very fun to fight.
Another aspect of this game that also got rather famous was bullet time.
Basically you can slow down the game and massacre enemies en mass.
This, while fun, also decreased the horror factor quite a bit.
Because basically, you're a super human fighting an Eldrich abomination.
Now if you were just a generic person, maybe that might make the game a little more scary,
but when you're a highly trained soldier who's also genetically augmented on top of that,
the horror aspect is definitely reduced somewhat.
Ultimately, FEAR is a good first person shooter.
But it is definitely not a horror first person shooter in any way, shape or form.
Do I recommend it?
Yes I do.
Primarily because the gameplay is really quite fun and the enemy AI is really quite good.
And so, this is Jon, signing off.