Friday, April 3, 2009

F.E.A.R. 2 - Children aren't scary anymore. They're just annoying.

I never finished Monolith's FEAR 1. It's a shame I am told, but I did thoroughly experience FEAR1's multiplayer through FEAR Combat to compensate for it. Although it doesn't fill in the singleplayer aspects I missed, since I already read about the plot development, I ruined any motivation to actually play through FEAR1, and jumped right ahead to FEAR2.

Firstly, before we do that, I must say, I liked FEAR Combat; its unique fast-paced, heart-thumping frenetic melee system; its awing display of sheer firepower without excessive effects flooding; its no-holds-barred deathmatch system where players were rewarded for their fearlessness. It did everything right in turning their slower singleplayer experience into an exciting, replayable multiplayer fragfest where you just could not find any better feeling than staking your enemies to the wall or exploding them into a cloud of blood with a hitscan weapon.

But that's the problem with FEAR2. They took everything great about the old FEAR and tossed it away, leaving nothing commendable, in singleplayer or multiplayer. Already, with just the sequel, the series seems tired and uninspired, the ideas worn thin.

The singleplayer feels like work. You slog through thousands of enemies, each taking nearly an entire clip unless you take the time to solidly put a burst of fire into the target's head. But there's the problem right there. You could carefully try to set up your headshots, by getting the initial surprise shots and slow-mo headshots... but what's the point? You'll kill 5-6 enemies this way, and then everyone else in the room (at least a good 20-30) will be alerted to your attention and you'll be caught out in the open without any slow-mo to save your ass from the hail of bullet-beatings you're about to receive. Trying to sneak around is impossible, since your enemies are literally superhuman anyway, and are capable of hearing your heartbeat and maybe even the tapping of your keyboard. And you often have to kill everyone in the room to progress the mission scripting to allow you into the next room. The player doesn't feel like he has a choice, but rather that he must tediously trudge through a sea of bodies to reach his destination. But here's the main question: Is it faster to run and gun through the hordes or is it faster to plan it out? The answer is quite clear in FEAR2: you rush, you spam everything you have, and you try to pick up just about everything you can. You turn your brain off, and you repeat an unpleasant task for the next few hours for the sake of some promised recompensation. Worse, whether you try to be smart or try to be accurate, the speed at which you drop bodies isn't going to change. Applying skills or thought to your task is an unrewarded waste of time. Like I said, it's akin to menial labour. Nothing you do will get you through it faster, you just have to sit it out.

Frankly, its level of boredom and mundane gameplay is compounded by the fact that everything is too easy! You may notice that you will not always be picking up armor and health whenever you see them like everything else in the game. But it's not because you're trying to save your health/armor boosts for the most efficient moment... It's because you just have too many of them and will never use them. With excessive healthpacks and armor abound, even on the hardest difficulty, the game was never in the least bit challenging. How are you even going to try to frighten me when I'm fully capable of singlehandedly annihilating armies without a scratch? the entire game feels like a method of conditioning you to become fearless of any possible threat... But not even for the right reasons. Fear Combat had you be fearless because the more you killed and the more you rushed, the more medpacks you'd receive from your fallen enemies. FEAR 2 has you fearless because it's too damned boring to be doing things any other way!

The weapons in FEAR2 don't help. Their variety is terrible, as certain weapons are often spammier versions of another, just with a larger clip and less damage; they're just the same weapon with just about the same average damage. The only thing you're really going to be taking into consideration is whether or not you want to fill up one of your few weapon slots with something that you may find no more ammo for later on. Weapons aren't creative either. Their effects are unimpressive at best, and even the Penetrator's effect has been scaled back. Most weapons though are very conventional, and lack the sort of high-tech feel that FEAR1 had. Now it wouldn't be an issue if your guns still felt powerful... But they don't. They feel cheap and tacky, as if you were firing pellets out of your plastic gun. The problem lies in a combination of the sound, the feel, the kick and the damage dealt. It's all wrong. Even the shotgun was terrible, until you got the Combat Shotgun, which was still mediocre, even in its most optimal situations. What ended up being the best weapon that gave you a sense of lethality? The sniper rifle. Yep. The conventional Sniper Rifle trumps the Laser Gun, the Pulse Weapon, the new Penetrator, even the RPG. Despite being carried by fairly normal trash mob opponents only halfway through the game, it only makes appearances in very specific sections where long range shooting is prevalent, so ammo is scarce. The problem is, Monolith wanted you to only really use the Sniper Rifle in these specific spots and throw away the gun right after, where they expected it to be useless. Essentially, the Sniper Rifle was a mini-game weapon, a gimmick. However, since it was the only weapon they got right, in the hands of a good player, it became your ultimate weapon to get you past the baddies that were just too much of a pain to dispatch any other way. For me, it WAS my Pulse Rifle, and was worth carrying around for 2-3 levels just to use it to clear a specific chokepoint room. That either says really good things about the Sniper Rifle, or really disgraceful things about the Pulse Rifle, the supposed BFG of FEAR2. Often times developers will put in a massive drawback to super-weapons, often a low rate of fire or ammo capacity... And Monolith gives the Pulse Rifle and Laser Rifle the same treatment. The problem is they took it too far. The Laser Rifle has very limited ammo and can deplete its entire magazine in 5 seconds, and considering it takes 3.5 seconds to down a single enemy, there is no place in the game worth using it. It has the lethality of the Link Gun from UT3. In fact, I'm sure its even weaker than that. The Pulse Rifle is worse. It fires a plasma fireball, which feels like the Shockball from UT3, except its a lot smaller, and is slow. Real slow. It is slower than the speed at which you walk at. You can literally out run this projectile even when its fired in your face. The speed of the fireball slows down as it moves away from the point of origin, so it gets even easier to evade. Forget using this weapon at long range, the fireball will slow to a crawl and self-detonate before it even gets anywhere close. An AOE superweapon with low accuracy that is effective only in short range, yet has a low rate of fire and small clip? Really? Who would use this thing? It's not even like the Gluon Gun in Half Life, since that, although short ranged, was very devastating and hard to dodge in close quarters. No, the Pulse Rifle is a single slow moving projectile that starts small and is easily dodged at close range, even more easily dodged at far range, and the AOE is easily predictable. You can't even use it like a slow-ass rocket launcher, since if it were like that, you'd at least be able to aim at the wall and the ground to use the AOE to your advantage. The plasma ball BOUNCES off every surface until the full distance is covered (also the point where the sphere slows down to a crawl and expires) before the AOE effect occurs. What a bitch.

Where are the FEAR1 weapons that actually had some potential in the right hands? The Particle Weapon was godly, the G2, ASP, Penetrator could all kill with relatively few shots to the torso, and the Repeating Cannon, while difficult to use, was a guaranteed one shot kill at any range. Sorry to spend so much time on the weapons, but the weapons make up a huge part of the gameplay, and the gameplay is a huge part of any FPS.

The story was rather bland, although I appreciated the unveiling of the conspiracy and the developing surrounding the Harbinger project. While most of this stuff should be pretty obvious to those who played the first FEAR, their presentation was decent, without a lot of intrusive 'oh btw, this is what you missed'. However, there were too many PDAs and intel documents to collect. Basically 90% of what you learn about the conspiracy, the organizations, the characters, the buildup is all from reading PDAs. Even Doom 3 didn't go overboard with it like this. Anyway, having read the PDAs, the unfolding of the story was unsurprising, and your allies weren't of much help. 'She's attracted to you like pizza at an anime convention'? Is this something you'd expect special operatives to say?

In the early stages of the game, you'll immediately notice that something feels different with the UI of the game. Then you realise, you're wearing some souped up shades with an integrated HUD display and the most obnoxious color tint in the world. At one point, you'll take your shades off, and it'll feel like a breath of fresh air. Don't get used to it; it doesn't last, and you'll be trying to peer out of a coffin again. What bothers me is I don't get a choice. You have helpful things displayed with your shades, like your ammo and HP... but also an array of paranormal hallucinations, sudden visual lighting compensation failures and a constant flickering. You won't know whether or not the contacts on your glasses need resoldering or if someone is playing with the light switch. I guess that was Monolith's objective. But also, in that case, I'd whip off the glasses and throw them away at first indication of it's faultiness. I could do without the ammo and hp meter - the game is easy enough - but Alma's hallucinatory effects are not scary, just migraine-inducing. Get rid of the glasses and the game no longer aggravates brain tumors.

Scary, the game is not. Like I mentioned, the glasses contribute a large role to the problem, but once you get it in your mind that you're a walking deathdealer with full hp, armor and bristling with weapons, there's not a lot that can shake you up. Most of the hallucinations are just that, so they can't really hurt you. The paranormals can eventually deal damage to you, but it is so minimal, they mind as well just be tickling you with their ethereal feathers. Not like it matters, one single snapshot bullet from your weakest weapon will dispatch them. What a joke, was this supposed to be difficult for any one that wasn't trying to play on a gamepad with a capped sensitivity? When Alma shows up and starts ripping people to shreds, you'd think you'd feel a little bit anxious. But you don't. They are such clear cutscene moments, that you know you are not in control of your character, and thus, Alma won't hurt you. When Alma is finally capable of inflicting some pain, it's pathetic. She tries to strangle you... And after you spam melee to throw her off, she disappears. Considering how this hardly even makes you gag, you'll be conditioned into laughing off every encounter with Alma, and just casually walking by and snapshotting her telekinetic baddies with your pistol. What a scarefest. What happened to her super powers that she utilized to obliterate each one of your teammates one by one? So much build up, and then for what? She tries to choke you to death like she's the villain of a B-slasher flick after easily being capable of sending her acid tentacles through warped time and space?

Multiplayer is really no better. It's confined to very few modes, on very few maps. It's a bit like COD4 in that you have customizable loadouts for when you spawn in, and you can pick up additional weapons from map spawns or off your enemies. Your health automatically recharges in multiplayer, but you need to stand next to an ammo box to steadily regain armor. Health kits are still present, but I haven't found any outside of actually spawning in with them. You can also pickup health injectors, but not everyone drops them, unlike in Fear Combat. Nor do Health Injectors restore 50% HP anymore, but only a mere 25%. The weapons in Multiplayer are further dampened in strength, and the Sniper Rifle requires at least 2 bodyshots to kill a medium armored target. A highly armored target requires 3 bodyshots (or 1 headshot and a bodyshot). That's weaker than in singleplayer, but not by much. Comparing to Fear Combat, people on average take about twice as long to kill. Meleeing is no longer instant kill either. It will take more melee hits, depending on how much health or armor they have remaining. A fully armored target takes 3-4 melee hits to die. Why must you ruin a good high-risk/reward mechanic, Monolith? Another thing that is gone is sprinting. While in FEAR you could run forever by holstering your weapon, you could close distance fast, get around the map quickly, and still not be completely undefended, as you could still melee while running. FEAR2 does away with this by giving you a generic stamina bar, but it's ridiculously short and unhelpful. Your sprint doesn't do much to get you anywhere, and usually it's just not worth the risk to sprint a short distance without having the one-hit-melee to defend yourself.

Basically, FEAR2 Multiplayer has been toned down. It's not as fast paced, it's not innovative, and it doesn't reward players for doing something out of the ordinary like the first one did. It is a stale and uninspired multiplayer that feels like a tacked on afterthought component. When you really have no modes outside of TDM and CTF, things can really get boring. Even FEAR Combat was more exciting in CTF, with much larger map rooms, where teams would engage each other, tearing up the walls and peeping around corners (leaning is gone btw) with much faster runners attempting to circumvent the blockages and flank or snatch flags.

Sometimes you just don't mess with what works, and FEAR2 is a perfect example.

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