Played on Extreme difficulty.
A mysterious enemy has arisen from within the dwellings of a biotech company. A clone army, led by a man who's known only as Fennel to you and your squad, has been let loose and must be eliminated before they contaminate the abandoned hallways of every corporate office building in America. As a member of the First Encounter Assault Recon team, only YOU can stop the nefarious Fennel and uncover the secrets hidden within his plans.
FEAR, a first person shooter released in 2005 and developed by Monolith Productions, known for their legendary PC titles such as Blood and No One Lives Forever, is a game that's all about the journey. Plopped into the body of an unknown operative, its your job to move forward through the game's numerous corporate office environments towards the truth while mowing down as many nameless, faceless dudes as possible with an arsenal of some of the best feeling weapons in the business.
The secret to FEAR's persevering brilliance is not its horror infested storytelling or its brilliant slow-mo bullet time mechanic, but its level design. Using then state of the art artificial intelligence, Monolith demonstrates their prowess in architecture by sending you through blazing through mazes of offices, hallways, multi-tiered rooms with multiple options of approach, and large spaces that challenge you to maximize your loadout to reach peak effectiveness. Though visually they meld together through their mid-2000s office aesthetic, each of the game's levels use the office set pieces to craft continuously engaging and exciting encounters that often feel like the perfect middle ground between a Half Life and Halo firefight in terms of balance and enemy presence.
Where FEAR perhaps shows its age however is in its narrative design; much of FEAR's storytelling is done through distorted visions, audio logs, and through scanning computers that your partner then reads a summary of for you. It seldom feels connected to anything you're actually doing; as you mow down Fennel's finest, a complex narrative of corporate culture and scientific experimentation is built up around you, while you yourself have little impact on the events depicted, nor do they seem to impact the gameplay at all. FEAR for the most part feels like the perfect evolution of the DOOM formula in that it emphasizes speed, movement, and responsive action. The horror elements and storytelling sorta just feel taped on with scotch tape.
Ultimately, FEAR is a brilliant exemplar of the power of an incredibly good feeling shotgun, pistol, and assault rifle in an FPS title. It's level design is top notch, its atmosphere is occasionally creepy in an effective manner, and its storytelling is half rate. It remains mostly unscathed by time; what is good about it in 2024 has always been good about it, and what's bad about it is easily forgotten as you hit the CTRL key and listen to the sound of one more bad dude yell, "OH SHI-" as you blast him into a cloud of red pulp.
A mysterious enemy has arisen from within the dwellings of a biotech company. A clone army, led by a man who's known only as Fennel to you and your squad, has been let loose and must be eliminated before they contaminate the abandoned hallways of every corporate office building in America. As a member of the First Encounter Assault Recon team, only YOU can stop the nefarious Fennel and uncover the secrets hidden within his plans.
FEAR, a first person shooter released in 2005 and developed by Monolith Productions, known for their legendary PC titles such as Blood and No One Lives Forever, is a game that's all about the journey. Plopped into the body of an unknown operative, its your job to move forward through the game's numerous corporate office environments towards the truth while mowing down as many nameless, faceless dudes as possible with an arsenal of some of the best feeling weapons in the business.
The secret to FEAR's persevering brilliance is not its horror infested storytelling or its brilliant slow-mo bullet time mechanic, but its level design. Using then state of the art artificial intelligence, Monolith demonstrates their prowess in architecture by sending you through blazing through mazes of offices, hallways, multi-tiered rooms with multiple options of approach, and large spaces that challenge you to maximize your loadout to reach peak effectiveness. Though visually they meld together through their mid-2000s office aesthetic, each of the game's levels use the office set pieces to craft continuously engaging and exciting encounters that often feel like the perfect middle ground between a Half Life and Halo firefight in terms of balance and enemy presence.
Where FEAR perhaps shows its age however is in its narrative design; much of FEAR's storytelling is done through distorted visions, audio logs, and through scanning computers that your partner then reads a summary of for you. It seldom feels connected to anything you're actually doing; as you mow down Fennel's finest, a complex narrative of corporate culture and scientific experimentation is built up around you, while you yourself have little impact on the events depicted, nor do they seem to impact the gameplay at all. FEAR for the most part feels like the perfect evolution of the DOOM formula in that it emphasizes speed, movement, and responsive action. The horror elements and storytelling sorta just feel taped on with scotch tape.
Ultimately, FEAR is a brilliant exemplar of the power of an incredibly good feeling shotgun, pistol, and assault rifle in an FPS title. It's level design is top notch, its atmosphere is occasionally creepy in an effective manner, and its storytelling is half rate. It remains mostly unscathed by time; what is good about it in 2024 has always been good about it, and what's bad about it is easily forgotten as you hit the CTRL key and listen to the sound of one more bad dude yell, "OH SHI-" as you blast him into a cloud of red pulp.