Here I’m going to make my own Zero-Punctuation-style review of a video game. Zero Punctuation is a neat review site which had been mentioend here before, featuring breathless but bitingly cruel jabs at the games. It’s video reviews, but I don’t have Windows Movie Maker or any artistic talent.
Spoilers may abound, and yes, the game is older, but darn it, I juts got it, so deal with it.
Ready?
OK:
…
F.E.A.R. is a massively overhyped First Person Shooter which vaguely crawled its way out the hind-end of Monolith Productions, who have succeeded in making one of the blandest games in a long lineup of halfway decent quasi-shooters. I mean, really people? Shogo? Blood II? The Matrix Online? Yeah, sure, you got No One Lives Forever in there, so where in the name of Austin-Power’s velour underpants is NOLF 3?
Regardless, in FEAR I’m not putting the stupid punctuation marks because the game is damn well called fear, not First Encounter Assault Recon; you just made up the stupid acronym in possibly the most blatantly pointless instance of obnoxious stupidity in history they once again decided to make a quasi shooter, or in this case a SHooter combiend with a horror game. Unfortunately, they forgot one thing. Horror has to be, y’know, scary, and this totally and completely fails.
It’s nice to know that Monolith has continued in their pproud tradition of totally cocking up anything which isn’t the shooter part of their freaky hybrid shooters. In this case, the fear doesn’t actually work. I hate to break it to you but oddly enough, after I slaughter 500 cloned killers who merrily march to their death, often by me decapitating them with a shutgun, turn their bodies into thin red smears on the wall with a grenade, or literally nail them to the wall with the Heavy Penetrator (no sirree nothing blatantly sexual implied there) Gun, a little girl wandering around doesn’t quite carry the same impact.
This might be forgivable if the storyline was any good, but it sucks the Heavy Penetrator if you know what I mean and you do. There really isn’t any story. You’re just plunked down to kill the clone commander, but this is quite impossible because he simply vanishes or something whenever you get close. Apparently you get to be near him a half-dozen times in the game, but he stays one step of you like the last difficulty on Tetris. This rapidly gets old and you pretty quickly figure out you don’t get to do anything about him. Meanwhile, it turns out that apparently, in what is not in the least bit a ludicrously wild coincidence, you happen to be related to pretty much everyone in the game who survives longer than ten seconds. It features, in no particular order, your brother, mother, grandad, and aunt, all as major characters. Meanwhile, the game forgets halfway about one major character (or as major as anyone in this game). He just vanishes without a trace and no body is ever found, so we never know what happened to him, except that he was apparently still alive halfway through because his radio was responding.
The gunfights are fairly good but it’s basically just the same fight over and over. There’s almost no difference from one battle to the next, and the occaisional really tough enemy doesn’t do much to break it up. The A.I. is nice but you soon find that there’s a nasty little problem to it. It’s not very aggressive and the level design is so predicatable that you have to play defensive the whole game. So you just sit around a corner, sometimes chucking a grenade through, and then lean out to unleash a clip on a clone. Rinse and Repeat. If they do attack you, you just wait until you hear them or see their shadow, hit the slowmo button, and pop them with a shotgun blast to the forehead. You might theoretically try something mroe kinetic, but the nature of the game is that your health gets shredded fast so you have to be very careful. You simply can’t afford to take any chances, and it gets very old.
The other irritating little burr is the bloody technology. The enemies get to walk around with heavy death armor suits, super-powered power armor, plus laser drones, invisible power armor assains, and god knows what else. You get to carry a couple of reasonably cool guns, for which you will never find ammo because the enemies, who magically get to pull ammunition out their own arses, never bother to stock any except whatever happens to be in their guns at the time you kill them. Where can I get this stuff? Oh, right, I can’t, because the retarded programmers didn’t put it in. Bastards.
As a final twist in the knife, there’s the odd sensation that nothing you do matters. Everything you do in the game is essentially meaningless. Everybody dies and would have died without you, the game’s script more or less says things would have happened just the same without your involvement, and generally you’re just walking around killing things. By the end of Extraction Point, everyone’s dead and your arch-nemesis actually came back from the dead after you drilled throughthe skull with a .45.
Granted, the game isn’t bad, but it starts getting more and more tedious. Extaction point features more horror aspects, but there isn’t really anything to it and the level design continues to be bland. It’s the same Industrial Park/Office complex decor your see throughout the entire first game, with only a couple of minor twists here and there to spice things up. I mean, there was this incredibly fun firefight in a church early on, with me ducking between the pews and strafing down the length of them, but it didn’t go anywhere and I got dumped in a sewer soon after. Meanwhile, the evil clone commander guy simply comes back from the dead with no explanation. Eventually, killing all the bad guys felt like work more than fun, and I got to the end to see, well, nothing exactly - I was left in exactly the same situation as when I started the game, having accomplished precisely dick.