Gameplay

F.E.A.R 2, which Tim is insisting I punctuate ‘properly’ as part of a punishment for farting louder than he does, is strangely slow to get going on the action side of things.

The first part of the game sees the player and the rest of the Delta Force unit storming the Armacham HQ, but for the first ten or fifteen minutes there isn’t actually a huge amount to do other than watch the scripted events laid out for you. It’s only after the big explosion that you actually get a chance to fight enemies in something else than a boring cubicle farm.

Mercifully, though the first levels are pretty boring and predictable, the game eventually improves in level design. Slowly you work your way from the succession of boring arenas up, into the open air and devastated, post-nuclear streets.

Planes are falling out of the sky, storefronts are more smashed than a post-rehab Amy Winehouse and ash-crusted corpses dot the streets. There are shadows burned into the walls and worse.


Oh, and there are at least two separate armies ganging up on you too – the Armacham security forces are still in the area and an upgraded version of the Replica Army from the first game has been reactivated too. Only the bad guys have survived the blast, it seems and they all hate you.

You’ve got a few tricks up your combat-trained sleeves though, the first of which is your ability to slow down your perception of time. Just like in the first F.E.A.R you can upgrade your reflex ability by collecting the yellow hypodermics that inexplicably litter the levels and using the ability highlights enemies and let you dodge bullets with ease.

Exactly how useful you find your bullet-time powers though depends massively on what skill setting you play the game on. Trying F.E.A.R 2 out on normal skill, bullet-time was more of a convenience than a requirement – until you start facing off against the invisible ninja baddies, at least. Notching the difficulty up to challenging though means it suddenly gets harder than trying to play with the screen turned off.

Balancing out the relative ease of the normal setting though are the handful of baddies who are obviously meant to be a bit more challenging, but who just end up as annoying as sandpaper boxer shorts. There are the invisible assassins who can be one-shotted easily but come in huge waves, the laser-toting Replicas who can cut you in half with ease...and the quicktime events. Ugh.


Monolith has obviously realised that there’s a fundamental problem with F.E.A.R’s formula – that the game isn’t all that scary because you know the game design will never let the ghostly Alma insta-kill you. That would be unfair and it’s a good thing that Alma doesn’t do it, but it also removes any idea of scariness that a time-controlling soldier might feel.

The solution to this issue though is clearly not to have enemies where you just have to hammer ‘G’ as fast as possible to not die. All that does is make us angrier than a beehive that’s just been sexually assaulted by a grizzly bear. Those bears love honey, you know.

One thing it also does is highlight that a lot more work has gone into the action side of the game than has gone into creating a genuinely scary atmosphere. The moment-to-moment gunplay of the game is vastly superior to the re-heated and awkwardly paced horror tactics which are mostly nothing but disappointing.

Oh, another blurry screen and silhouette of a girl being conveniently projected onto the wall up ahead? It’s hardly going to require a change of underwear, is it?