I was going to give it a slightly higher rating but the ending was so bad that it singlehandedly took that last point away, FEAR 2 is a demonstration of how to do everything wrong in a sequel. The story sucks, the characters mostly suck (Stokes is okay, the most likable character doesn't get a personality until the literal end of the game), the gunplay is a massive downgrade, leaning is gone which is one of the stupidest decisions I've ever seen, there's very little tension at any point in the game (there was exactly one horror-esque scene that really drew me in, everything else was just cheap jump scares, blink and you miss it appearances, or entirely unengaging due to said lack of tension). They added a sprint for some reason and it's useless, you barely go faster and stamina drains so quickly that it's basically pointless to use, audio seems to be massively buggy (glass shattering makes no noise, explosions make no noise, gunfire's often silent which makes finding where you're being shot from a pain), at one point I encountered the "sound acceleration error" that quite literally removed all sound until it randomly fixed itself on a new launch. It suffers from the same poor choice that Perseus Mandate made with combat just being so constant it becomes a drag, enemies seem to die slower than ever, and enemies that made for tense encounters in the past are spammed so much that they might as well be generic fodder.

The only good things I can say about FEAR 2 are that the writing was actually kinda funny at times, and while the gunplay is significantly worse than it was in FEAR + expansions, it's still a bit above average even while feeling completely gimped. This is a very hard game to recommend, even as someone that likes FEAR enough to be forcing myself through parts that I'm thoroughly not enjoying.