F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Review

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(More customer reviews)In 2005, F.E.A.R. was an incredible experience for me. I loved the combat, loved the story, loved the scares. Which makes this experience all the more painful several years later. Simply put, F.E.A.R. 2 continues the trend of making console ports into PC games, and it's once again a tragic failure.

I will not delve on the story, except to say surprisingly few of the main characters from F.E.A.R. are in there. Sure, a certain little girl roams the halls of this new release, but other than that there is not a whole lot of the First Encounter Assault Recon team in this "F.E.A.R." experience. The story is also quite short, even on the hardest setting, but I suppose this is the trend nowadays. Or perhaps it is for another reason, like the glaringly dumbed-downed enemy AI, or the lack of an "extreme" difficulty setting like its predecessor had.

Which brings me to the laundry list of problems with this game for PC gaming. For starters, the AI pales in comparison to the original. At first I was disappointed that they took the ability to lean out of the game (especially because the enemies can still use this forbidden feature), but then I realized that it was so easy to best the AI in combat it didn't matter. And be careful when using that slow-motion, because it causes the enemies to light up with a glow effect reminiscent of Assassin's Creed, in case you had any trouble shooting them before. Overall, combat is not nearly as polished or as fun as F.E.A.R. The new cover system? Might be helpful if anything you took cover behind actually fit the player; instead, most of your body is still exposed.

And the list of egregious errors continues. There is horrible letterboxing across the top and the bottom of the screen if you do not play on a 16:9 display, meaning all monitors of standard 4:3 and widescreens of 16:10 will be out in the cold. There is a film grain which, when played at the highest resolutions, looks absolutely atrocious and ruins the depth of the graphics, which are a tad dated to begin with. Shadows are glitchy at best: sometimes they appear for certain items, sometimes not, in multiplayer never. The clumsy HUD takes up almost the entire screen. And the best part about all these mistakes? There are no options to disable them. The lack of customization in this game is laughable- it's far more restrictive than the original!

But these are mostly cosmetic fallacies- the real deal-breakers are far more critical. For example, you cannot save/load from wherever you want, but merely from a series of checkpoints. In a PC first-person shooter. Are you serious? This is an extremely visible error that screams console implementation and in no way should be included in a computer game. Want to map your extra mouse buttons as in the original? Not possible. But even that is a relatively small affair compared to the multiplayer woes of this game. In short, there are no dedicated server files or anti-cheat measures. That's right: a game which requires Steam to install and run has no real servers, merely hosted games running on other people's machines. This might be fine for an XBOX or PS3, but it is completely unacceptable in 2009 for a game to have a watered-down MP experience far worse than its 2005 predecessor. Fortunately, if and when you get MP to work it is a pretty forgettable experience. No leaning, no slow-motion, no real difference between F.E.A.R. 2 multiplayer and any other shooter. Call of Duty 4 runs circles around what this games "multiplayer" claims to be. Bottom-line: F.E.A.R. 2 has console multiplayer, and it's utterly absurd on a PC.

Overall, F.E.A.R. 2 is, simply put, the biggest disappointment for a sequel which I can recall in the last decade. Even Far Cry 2 didn't make some of the more tragic development errors F.E.A.R. 2 is chock-full of. Taking the huge PC community which loved F.E.A.R. and giving them a bargain-bin console port is the only thing that really scares me about this game. Monolith, normally a pretty reliable outfit, has gone the way of many other developers and gone after the casual console crowd with this one, and it's a shame.

People who pay one, two, three, or even four-thousand dollars plus on a computer system do not want to play a game that they could have played on a console for a couple hundred. They want the ambiance and feel of the original F.E.A.R., not some watered down garbage that caters to the more simplistic crowd. Sure, the game is scary at times, and yes, the graphics can look good given the right circumstances, but this is nothing like F.E.A.R. Gone is the intelligent combat. Gone is the legitimate feeling of fear. Gone is any chance of a multiplayer community. And, perhaps worst, gone is my fifty dollars on a game I expected to be the best shooter of 2009.

Save your money and your fond memories of the original F.E.A.R. This might as well be the Activision/Blizzard version- the one with the same name but none of the same feel. Monolith should have just left the name as Project Origin and not tarnished the good name of the F.E.A.R. franchise with this console mess. Caveat emptor.

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