Virtual 100 – Game 7

Well that was a pretty quick turnaround. In game-time speak, at least. It’s been a little while since I added another game to the grid, due to real-life stuff, but I started playing F.E.A.R. 2 almost immediately after the first one, mainly out of pure curiosity. And I just kinda kept going. And it turned out to be a pretty short game.

To be fair, I think the first F.E.A.R. felt a lot longer than it really was. A lot of my replays were the result of my dumb ass forgetting to quicksave. But also, the original F.E.A.R. was much more unforgiving. Project Origin was a cakewalk by comparison. I will try a game, especially a game like this that I don’t want to spend too much time with, on a normal difficulty setting at first, and if it starts to prove a challenge beyond what I’m willing to commit to, I will happily bump down the difficulty for the pure sake of moving on with my life. I played through F.E.A.R. on normal, with the expectation of bumping it down in the later game stages, but while the game was difficult in some areas, it was never that bad, and I got through it well enough. Remembering to quicksave helps.

But F.E.A.R. 2 never even posed the question in my brain. I actually had to double-check the difficulty toward the end of the game for the purpose of the write-up. I totally expected to see it set to Easy. And it wasn’t. It was on normal, and I literally did a double-take. Sure, I died a couple of times, mainly because the lack of any real challenge made me a bit complacent and a lot of times I wouldn’t even bother to take cover. This resulted in me taking a bit too much damage a few times and not paying attention to my health meter. Or I stepped on a grenade while strafing, or something stupid. Not once do I believe it was because of the actual designed difficulty of a situation.

If this was a true issue, I would have bumped up the difficulty myself. But in all honesty, I love games like this. Games that are easy enough to blast through, but still offer just enough of an enemy punch where I can’t sleep my way through. I love feeling like a badass, and this game succeeds in that regard. There are plenty of weapons to utilize, and the feeling of satisfaction from blasting a dude with a shotgun in slo-mo is something that will never go away. The game even ups the ante on a few occasions and we get to hop into a mech and lay waste to squads of enemy soldiers. Whoever designed this game knew exactly what the phrase “power fantasy” means, and they were happy to oblige.

That said, the game still falls into a few traps held over from the original. While it’s the whole point of the game, the supernatural aspect is still the weakest part of the game, and the faceless bad guys are still just a name the characters use. ARMACHAM and Replica Soldiers and Snake Fist and this guy and that lady and so on and so forth still don’t do much more than make you think “oh yeah, them.”

There’s a J. Jonah Jameson wannabe bad guy commander that runs around in the background being an asshole, but other than that, your main baddie is still Alma, who only pops up when it’s convenient for the plot.

This time, the story takes place immediately after the first game, and centers around a guy named Beckett who is… you know what, it doesn’t matter. For whatever reason, Alma has taken a liking to you and wants to fiddle with your brain, but you are special and can resist and only your tele…kine…pathetic powers can defeat her.

Much like the first game, the story is told through a handful of cutscenes and info dumps and a shit ton of data files that are littered through the game. I tried to read as many of them as I could, but much like the first game, I honestly got tired of trying to keep track of all of it, especially across several play sessions that spanned a week and a half. I consulted the almighty Wiki for the details after I wrapped up the game and asked myself, “okay, now wtf did I just play?”

The graphics look pretty good, even by today’s standards, and my PC ran it well without having to jump through the hoops that the first F.E.A.R. required. But holy shit, this is a game from the days of the almighty Bloom Lighting, and damn is it blurry. I never really checked the settings to see if I could turn it off, but wow, those outdoor settings were hazy as hell. Indoors were better. I’m not sure if it’s because the level of detail was higher, and the overall tech was better, but it didn’t seem as though the game employed the physics and particle effects that the first game was so proud of. Maybe by this time, it was old hat, or maybe they toned it all down in order to get it to run on consoles, but during shootouts in tight quarters, I didn’t really notice much debris flying around. Like I said, it could be because the environments were more fleshed out and detailed and the original FEAR was pretty stark by contrast, but it wasn’t as apparent.

The gunplay was by far the biggest improvement. I’m not sure if the game really was that much easier than the first, or if it was because the guns were that much better. Project Origin employed aiming down the sights, which I don’t think F.E.A.R. did. This made getting headshots much easier. The game also used armor on top of the character health, and that helped to extend the lifespan quite a bit.

The weird thing is, my mouse wasn’t as customizable this time around. F.E.A.R. let me assign multiple actions to my mouse buttons, and I was able to shoot, melee, use a health kit, toss a grenade, etc., with the click of the mouse. I couldn’t do that this time around. For whatever reason, Project Origin didn’t recognize that my mouse had more than three buttons. I was only able to map my right and left mouse click and my center wheel. So other functions like tossing a grenade and using my slo-mo ability were relegated to the keyboard. While I realize this is a “me” problem, it was a bit annoying trying to get my pinky to reach the CTRL key for slo-mo while keeping my other fingers on the WASD keys, all while my thumb was sitting on my mouse, resting near two completely useless buttons. It’s probably a good thing the game wasn’t very difficult or else my bumbling ass might have had a hard time with it.

One of the things that did make it over from the original game were the overly-complicated, completely nonsensical level designs. While the graphics and the areas are at least a little bit more diverse, I still traversed a labyrinth of an elementary school. I genuinely felt sorry for those kids, as they probably got lost on their way to the bathroom on a daily basis. They went full-on Resident Evil with it, too, and it was revealed to be a cover for a secret underground facility. I’m okay with that, but it still raised a ton of logistical questions in my mind. From a business standpoint, it just doesn’t seem that practical. But then again, practicality wasn’t exactly Umbrella’s forte, either.

If both of the F.E.A.R. games had a single complaint from me, it’s that you linger in these places a tad too long. Not a single part of me wanted to be running through literally every single classroom in this school. Project Origin wasn’t as bad due to the brisk pace and relatively easy difficulty, but even in the short playtime I groaned when I realized I had to go through yet another tunnel and traverse yet another series of hallways. The series really needs to open up a bit, and I hope that F.E.A.R. 4, if it does indeed see the light of day, gets rid of the endless corridors.

Reborn

I played through this DLC because it’s canon and it leads directly into F.E.A.R. 3— wait, I’m sorry— F.3.A.R. .
It was fine. I did like that you’re technically playing as a Stormtro— Replica Soldier, and the psychic energy of the dude from the first game is essentially brainwashing you, leading you unwittingly into a trap so that he can possess your body and be “reborn.” Hence the name of the DLC. It answers the question that anyone booting up F.3.A.R. (ugh) for the first time might have when they say “Hey, I shot that guy in the face two games ago, how’s he walking around?”

What it won’t answer, however, is why they named F.E.A.R. 3 by replacing the E with a 3. Nobody likes that. Nobody has ever liked that. And I’m pretty damn sure they are going to do the same thing with F.E.4.R. (God forgive me for even typing that.)

I’m not going to spend any more time on this because it was just more of the same, just from a different perspective. And after playing the first two games back to back, I was already getting kind of burned out on the whole thing, so my enjoyment probably wasn’t as high as it could’ve been otherwise.

I do have the third game in my backlog as well, but I’m going to let the dust settle for a while before I hit it up.

But there we have it. Game #7 in the books. Or on the grid. Whatever. Only a few more games and I will be 1/10th of the way through this whole endeavor! I can’t wait to see what these writeups will look like by the mid-50’s. Anways, that’s that. Until next time.