F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate

Graphics

The graphics in Perseus Mandate are a little lack lustre to say the least and, while I previously thought that Hellgate: London was the worst looking that a triple-A game could get away with, I’ve since readjusted my opinions.

It’s not that the game looks bad, per se. It just looks old. The engine hasn’t been improved in terms of what it can handle and the textures and models which used to look really good back in 2005 now look awfully low res and plain.

Even with everything pumped up to maximum, as you can see in these screenshots, levels still feel empty and barren. Cars and crates feel as if they are geometrically part of the level rather than models placed in the world, so the whole game starts to feel like it was put together in the Build Engine from Duke Nukem 3D and then updated a little bit.

The textures are a major problem because not only do they lack detail but there are areas of the game where you can see them visibly repeating.

There is a flip side to this argument, which is that the game should be able to run on most laptops if it looks that bad and that the system requirements shouldn’t be that high. That’s not necessarily true though; the game still has 1GB of RAM and a 256MB DirectX 9.0 GPU as the recommended requirement, though you can get away with less than that.


There are parts of the game which look good – explosions and fire, whilst lacking billowing smoke for the most part, are still quite pretty. Shadows too are realistically simulated, which helps to make up for the horrible clash between light and dark areas and the woeful lack of soft-shadowing despite the option in the settings menu.

However, no matter how good these parts of the game look (and they still aren’t that great), there are a number of issues which constantly plague Perseus. Mainly it’s the banding of smoke as it clips through the environment which is the problem – something made incredibly noticeable thanks to the use of explosions at every available point. This is something we've become accustomed not to seeing, thanks to DirectX 10, so graphical flaws like these just became more apparent.

Conclusions

You can probably tell that I wasn’t that impressed with Perseus Mandate. As a singleplayer campaign it’s derivative and bland and I doubt there was enough inspiration involved in its development for someone to think their way out of a glass room with even if they already had a brick in their hand.

And, as a multiplayer game, it isn’t anything you can’t already get for free. Literally.


There is still some nugget of charm buried deep within Perseus Mandate however and I was pretty surprised by the reaction of one or two people in the office when I got my hands on it. Within moments, two people had separately mentioned to me how they wanted to borrow the game when the review was done so they could try it out. There just seems to be something about the franchise that gets people coming back no matter how bad I tell them the game is. The depressing thing is that I know how bad the game is, but I’ll still probably give it another full playthrough next time I have some time spare.

You see, that’s the rub, as they say. Perseus Mandate isn’t a great game and it isn’t even a good-looking game. But if you’ve read this review this far then we have to take it that you liked the original F.E.A.R. an awful lot. If that’s true then the chances are you’re going to pick this game up anyway, purely to experience the extra bits of the story. It’s a shame that you’ll likely waste your time on Perseus Mandate, because with the number of great games coming out at the moment there’s no excuse to be caught playing Perseus Mandate. None at all.