F.3.A.R
The F.E.A.R. series has always been a strange one to me. Advertised as a blend of FPS and horror it’s actually more of schizophrenic, switching between the two. In the background you have this creepy, disturbing story but what you’re presented with is fights with faceless soldiers. Soldiers are not scary.
It says a lot about a developer that they can give you a walking tank and still think they can make a game which terrifies you. Yes there are horror undertones but these are ruined by having two few actual monsters.
For those of you who haven’t played the F.E.A.R. series it centres on psychic warfare. A group called Armachan worked a secret project called project origin where they attempted to create the perfect psychic warrior. They experimented on a girl called Alma who became an extremely powerful Psychic. So powerful in fact that they found it hard to control her and while they managed to imprison her physical form to an extent, they could not stop her psychic abilities.
Considered a failure Armachan looked to her genes, impregnating Alma with genetically engineered embryos with the goal of combing Alma’s psychic abilities with highly skilled soldiers. She gave birth to two children, Fettel and Point Man.
In the first game as Point Man your job is to take down Fettel who had gone insane just as Alma did. Alma still sees herself as a little girl and you are haunted throughout the series by her psychic projection.
The big reveal at the end of the second game is that Alma is pregnant with a third child. You also free the now dead Fettel from his prison cell allowing his to psychically project himself into some sort of Poltergeist.
In this game Point Man and Fettel work together to find their mother and deal with this third child. This leads to a game with two unique first person play styles.
Point Man plays like he always had. Normal First person shooting with a bullet time-esque Slow motion ability thrown in to make it somewhat unique. Fettel on the other hand can possess enemies for a limited time and fire psychic projectiles.
You can tell from the first minute this game is made for co-op play and typically the single player suffers because of it. It always feels like you’re missing something playing alone and you shouldn’t need another person to get the most out of a game.
It has a fairly short campaign but makes up for that with its best feature, the challenges. There are a set number of challenges you can unlock when you play a level ranging for using your abilities completely draining your meter to shooting a certain number of people with each weapon. The goal is to unlock as many of these as possible each level.
The points you earn from challenges increase your characters level and as you level up you earn new perks from increased health and ability meter to additional Melee attacks. I’m a little weary of games adding a pointless RPG element but I don’t particular mind this one.
It’s a little like Call of Duty’s multiplayer and these challenges aren’t all that’s ripped from COD. Shooting feels very like COD, even the basic assault rifle has stolen the exact same holographic sight as most of COD’s weapons. F3AR is basically COD with the occasional horror style fucked up moment.
Unfortunately those are far too few and far too short. For a game series famed for its horror it is very light on it. The atmosphere is there but ultimately it doesn’t feel terrifying. At least this time however the monotony of fighting wave after wave of soldiers is broken up by crazed junkie style enemies and monster dogs. The former behave like the splicers from Bioshock with some suicide bombers thrown in. The latter are your standard avoid their lunges and counter enemies.
The cover system from the previous games is back and actually works pretty well. Like in a third person shooter you can lock yourself to cover and peak around corners. It’s a little different than traditional first person shooters but it soon becomes natural.
The guns are a little disappointing. For the majority of the game you have your standard two assault rifles, shotgun, sniper rifle, pistol, rocket launchers and uzis. Unfortunately the COD influence is in force and instead of using names they use codes. I don’t see why they couldn’t just give them proper names. I found myself calling them after their challenges rather than their actual names (e.g. the sniper rifle being the Ghost rather than the C-3PO or whatever the hell it was).
Another small annoyance is the difficulty or rather how the game treats difficulty and failure. Some developers seem to think if we’re struggling we want the game to play itself. Nintendo are getting to be notoriously bad at this, the White Tanuki suit for example. Ms Splosion man was the same offering the option to skip a difficult section (and since you died a lot you saw that screen a lot).
F3AR however has a slightly more annoying feature where if you die a couple of times it will automatically highlight “Change Difficulty” instead of “Reload Checkpoint”. For any developer reading this, it doesn’t matter how many times I die I NEVER WANT TO SKIP A SECTION OR CHANGE THE DIFFICULTY. I will keep trying a section until I get passed it and I will rapidly tap A until I’m back at the checkpoint, attempting to speed things up as much as possible (especially when I’m getting frustrated). I’ve almost been caught out by this and it is annoying.
The game does feature multiplayer but unfortunately the servers are dead. Shame because Soul King might’ve been fun. You can play against bots but there only seems to be two modes, the Horde/Firefight like contractions mode and Soul King.
Soul King sees you playing as a demon that can possess enemies. You chose an enemy to possess and kill other enemies. For every enemy you kill a skull appears, collect the skull to get points. The harder the enemy the higher the point value of the skull. If your possessed body dies you have to wait a couple of seconds before you can claim another, although once in a body to can move to another without waiting. Die when not in a body and you lose half your points. An interesting mode with some potential, shame no-one wants to play it.
Ultimately F3AR delivers a fairly average experience. For every good idea there is a slight annoyance. The campaign is short but made to be replayed with an awesome challenge system. You never feel like your getting the most out of the game unless you’re playing in co-op, even though both playable characters offer completely different Gameplay experiences. The multiplayer is dead but could’ve been fun, we’ll never know.
For a horror game there is far too much soldiers and Mecha, not enough fucked up moments and monsters, but at least the enemy types this time a little more varied. Plenty of Atmosphere but little horror to utilise it.
It’s a nice short game but feels like a ceramic mug amongst a sea of golden cups. I’ll happily take a drink out of it but I’d rather use one of the golden cups.
6/10
It says a lot about a developer that they can give you a walking tank and still think they can make a game which terrifies you. Yes there are horror undertones but these are ruined by having two few actual monsters.
For those of you who haven’t played the F.E.A.R. series it centres on psychic warfare. A group called Armachan worked a secret project called project origin where they attempted to create the perfect psychic warrior. They experimented on a girl called Alma who became an extremely powerful Psychic. So powerful in fact that they found it hard to control her and while they managed to imprison her physical form to an extent, they could not stop her psychic abilities.
Considered a failure Armachan looked to her genes, impregnating Alma with genetically engineered embryos with the goal of combing Alma’s psychic abilities with highly skilled soldiers. She gave birth to two children, Fettel and Point Man.
In the first game as Point Man your job is to take down Fettel who had gone insane just as Alma did. Alma still sees herself as a little girl and you are haunted throughout the series by her psychic projection.
The big reveal at the end of the second game is that Alma is pregnant with a third child. You also free the now dead Fettel from his prison cell allowing his to psychically project himself into some sort of Poltergeist.
In this game Point Man and Fettel work together to find their mother and deal with this third child. This leads to a game with two unique first person play styles.
Point Man plays like he always had. Normal First person shooting with a bullet time-esque Slow motion ability thrown in to make it somewhat unique. Fettel on the other hand can possess enemies for a limited time and fire psychic projectiles.
You can tell from the first minute this game is made for co-op play and typically the single player suffers because of it. It always feels like you’re missing something playing alone and you shouldn’t need another person to get the most out of a game.
It has a fairly short campaign but makes up for that with its best feature, the challenges. There are a set number of challenges you can unlock when you play a level ranging for using your abilities completely draining your meter to shooting a certain number of people with each weapon. The goal is to unlock as many of these as possible each level.
The points you earn from challenges increase your characters level and as you level up you earn new perks from increased health and ability meter to additional Melee attacks. I’m a little weary of games adding a pointless RPG element but I don’t particular mind this one.
It’s a little like Call of Duty’s multiplayer and these challenges aren’t all that’s ripped from COD. Shooting feels very like COD, even the basic assault rifle has stolen the exact same holographic sight as most of COD’s weapons. F3AR is basically COD with the occasional horror style fucked up moment.
Unfortunately those are far too few and far too short. For a game series famed for its horror it is very light on it. The atmosphere is there but ultimately it doesn’t feel terrifying. At least this time however the monotony of fighting wave after wave of soldiers is broken up by crazed junkie style enemies and monster dogs. The former behave like the splicers from Bioshock with some suicide bombers thrown in. The latter are your standard avoid their lunges and counter enemies.
The cover system from the previous games is back and actually works pretty well. Like in a third person shooter you can lock yourself to cover and peak around corners. It’s a little different than traditional first person shooters but it soon becomes natural.
The guns are a little disappointing. For the majority of the game you have your standard two assault rifles, shotgun, sniper rifle, pistol, rocket launchers and uzis. Unfortunately the COD influence is in force and instead of using names they use codes. I don’t see why they couldn’t just give them proper names. I found myself calling them after their challenges rather than their actual names (e.g. the sniper rifle being the Ghost rather than the C-3PO or whatever the hell it was).
Another small annoyance is the difficulty or rather how the game treats difficulty and failure. Some developers seem to think if we’re struggling we want the game to play itself. Nintendo are getting to be notoriously bad at this, the White Tanuki suit for example. Ms Splosion man was the same offering the option to skip a difficult section (and since you died a lot you saw that screen a lot).
F3AR however has a slightly more annoying feature where if you die a couple of times it will automatically highlight “Change Difficulty” instead of “Reload Checkpoint”. For any developer reading this, it doesn’t matter how many times I die I NEVER WANT TO SKIP A SECTION OR CHANGE THE DIFFICULTY. I will keep trying a section until I get passed it and I will rapidly tap A until I’m back at the checkpoint, attempting to speed things up as much as possible (especially when I’m getting frustrated). I’ve almost been caught out by this and it is annoying.
The game does feature multiplayer but unfortunately the servers are dead. Shame because Soul King might’ve been fun. You can play against bots but there only seems to be two modes, the Horde/Firefight like contractions mode and Soul King.
Soul King sees you playing as a demon that can possess enemies. You chose an enemy to possess and kill other enemies. For every enemy you kill a skull appears, collect the skull to get points. The harder the enemy the higher the point value of the skull. If your possessed body dies you have to wait a couple of seconds before you can claim another, although once in a body to can move to another without waiting. Die when not in a body and you lose half your points. An interesting mode with some potential, shame no-one wants to play it.
Ultimately F3AR delivers a fairly average experience. For every good idea there is a slight annoyance. The campaign is short but made to be replayed with an awesome challenge system. You never feel like your getting the most out of the game unless you’re playing in co-op, even though both playable characters offer completely different Gameplay experiences. The multiplayer is dead but could’ve been fun, we’ll never know.
For a horror game there is far too much soldiers and Mecha, not enough fucked up moments and monsters, but at least the enemy types this time a little more varied. Plenty of Atmosphere but little horror to utilise it.
It’s a nice short game but feels like a ceramic mug amongst a sea of golden cups. I’ll happily take a drink out of it but I’d rather use one of the golden cups.
6/10
posted by Master hunter at 1:33 pm
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