F.E.A.R.
The long-awaited FPS that was supposed to be scarier than Doom 3 and feature amazing battles, an intense plot, and intricate, creepy environments.
The game that recieved a 93% rating from the notoriously hard-to-please PC Gamer magazine.
The most overrated first person shooter of all time.
Could this game be any more generic? The same silver-gray office building interiors the whole way through. (Oh, sorry, there are a few generically grimy “industrial compound” levels too.) How unique. Enemies dressed in dark armored uniforms and nondescript gas masks, absolving the programmers of the responsibility to create different face models for the enemies - they went for the half-assed “have them all wear face masks” solution. A totally blah selection of weapons.
An undead little girl with “creepy” eyes - haven’t seen that since The Ring, Ring II, Dark Water, and every other Japanese-style “horror” film. LITTLE GIRLS ARE NOT SCARY. Give me zombies unexpectedly crashing through doors, corpses rotting in a morgue and then coming to life, hideously mutated genetic experiments like the unbelieveably badass and terrifying Regenerators from Resident Evil 4, a madman wielding a chainsaw, anything but another goddamn little girl covered in blood and staring with big empty eyes. It’s been done to death. So has all the other stuff I mentioned, but at least those things are intimidating and violent, instead of “creepy.” I don’t want “creepy.” I want “scary.”
The briefing screen of F.E.A.R. helpfully includes mission objectives for each new level. Unfortunately, the mission objectives are quite literally always the same: “Locate and neutralize Paxton Fettel.” Every single level, the objective is to “locate Paxton Fettel.” It almost makes me miss “find the red jewel” or “turn on the backup generators” or “find key-card X to open door Y.” At least those objectives give you a sense of progress and accomplishing something. Every level in F.E.A.R. is the same sense of not knowing what to do or where to go, and only completing the level after frustrating trial and error and a lot of boredom.
F.E.A.R. stands for “First Encounter Assault Recon.” Even if “Assault” and “Recon” were not polar opposites, that would still be a ridiculously stupid and un-creative acronymal namesake for the game. Man, can’t they come up with a better name? At least “Far Cry” sounds a little bit exotic.
Back to the tear-inducingly bland level design. The same boring hallways and the same exact formula over and over again: wander through some corridors, collect some health kits and ammunition in a small side-office, go back out into the hallway, and walk into a wide-open atrium area where you will be ambushed by gas-masked enemy troops. Hit “Control” to turn on the bullet time slo-mo effect, and slaughter them all. Pick up the ammunition and then continue to the next office corridor. Repeat.
Oh and every once in a while you have to get past GUN TURRETS. Oooooh, how insipred. Could there possibly be anything more half-assed on the part of the designers than to stick gun turrets in an area of the game? And it’s not just a small area, it’s a rather large space which is predominantly guarded by the same boring gun turrets. Ho hum.
To make matters even worse, I’m stuck playing F.E.A.R. while Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, the most amazing FPS/RPG yet to be, gets delayed over and over again by its enigmatic Russian developers, pushing the release date further and further ahead (right now it’s 2007.) Holy Christ! I want to play Stalker SO bad, and every screenshot I view of it only makes me drool more and more.
And tell me this aren’t the coolest-looking weather effects you’ve ever seen in a game? That sky will change from night to day. The clouds will MOVE! You get to explore over 30 square kilometers of a desolate but beautiful Ukrainian countryside littered with mutants, mercenaries, wild beasts, soldiers, and rogues, all in the middle of autumn (the most beautiful of the seasons) and with an ever-changing sky above you the likes of which have never been seen.
But, sorry, gamers, no Stalker for you. Play F.E.A.R. instead!
And don’t even tell me, oh, but Adam, Half-Life 2, Episode One is coming! Go suck on a lemon. I can already tell what Episode One is going to be: Gordon Freeman making his way out of the flaming rubble of the Citadel, climing down from heaps of rock and twisted metal, crawling across a stretched wire or two, dodging some falling debris, fighting a few dozen Combine soldiers (who, instead of accepting the defeat of the Combine, joining with you and escaping a collapsing building with their lives, decide to attack you and will be slaughtered like flies), not to mention a few stealth levels in which you will control Alyx. Oooh, a stealth side-mission in which you get to control the female character. I’m getting excited just imagining it.
Damn you, F.E.A.R. , give us Stalker NOW!!!