http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpr_6O5iyls

I'm downloading it right now via Steam, looks decent.

8/10 from IGN.

[Edited on June 21, 2011 at 3:57 PM. Reason : -]

6/21/2011 3:57:36 PM

I enjoyed the first one. The second one was less scary, more weird, and much more fluff. I'll likely get the third though.

6/21/2011 4:17:19 PM

Yeah, I'd be interested in a review from the perspective of someone that's played all 3. Part 1 was pretty good for its day. I never got interested enough in part 2 to even bother finishing it.

Now I find myself jaded on FPS games in general. They've really got to bring something to the table. So what does F.E.A.R. 3 bring? There are a few comments in the linked video saying it's hard. That's certainly something in this day and age where most FPSs are a cakewalk.

[Edited on June 22, 2011 at 9:50 AM. Reason : -]

6/22/2011 9:48:54 AM

The biggest draw for me is multiplayer play with matrix mode slow motion. I've only made it to level 2 in the campaign, on Commando (Medium Diff), and it's very hard for an FPS. Advancing through a room of dudes is realistic, they use suppressing fire to pin you, while other dudes throw grenades behind you for the pwn. If you get really close to dudes, they fall back and reposition, and flank. The AI is pretty good really, except sometimes they call out what they are about to do, which is probably the Developers attempt to make the game not extremely hard. If the dudes were completely silent, it would actually be too hard to survive. So far, so good. Also, if you have a half decent video card, the textures are really nice.

[Edited on June 22, 2011 at 10:08 AM. Reason : -]

6/22/2011 10:04:08 AM

If the AI is decent I'll eventually give this one a shot.

How does bullet time work in multiplayer? I assume the game slows down for everyone any time one person activates bullet time otherwise there would be sync issues, no?

6/22/2011 11:07:11 AM

I'm late to the party, but I wanted to share my thoughts.

I'm having fun with this game, but in a lot of ways I'm pretty disappointed. We went from portable medkits to regenerating health and a cover system (which I found kind of dumb to use; all you have to do is do a normal crouch behind cover and slowly peak out. Not that getting hit matters, since your health will regenerate anyway). They basically took Halo, added a bullet-time ability and slapped the F.E.A.R. logo on it. It is more of the slow-mo shooting that I loved in the first 2 games, but it feels pretty...generic now.

That's playing as Point Man, though; playing as Fettel is wicked cool and fun. Levitate enemies and them blast them in the face with psychic bolts, or just crush them to death. Even better is to possess an enemy and then suicide-run into a bunch of them. If you still live, explode the enemies into paste as you exit their bodies. The only thing that could have made it better is if Fettel could have thrown objects at enemies (aside from explosive barrels and grenades), or even throw levitated enemies at enemies! Perhaps that would make him too overpowered, but it would be fucking awesome.

I haven't tried out any of the multiplayer yet (unreliable connection atm), but I've heard nothing but good things about it. I generally don't do a lot of multiplayer anyway, but I may have to make an exception in this case. But good multiplayer or not, the single player campaign is extremely lacking. My first major gripe is that it's too damn short; I was able to beat the game as Point Man in the better part of a day (this was on commando (medium?) difficulty, if that makes a difference). The second major gripe is that it did a very piss poor job of making me scared for a game that's called "fear." Even the demon hound things weren't scary, at best they were annoying when coming at you in a large swarm.

The third and final gripe is the sloppy writing (SPOILERS AHOY).

First off, what the fuck was the point of tracking down Beckett? Was he suppose to have information on where Alma was? Could we not have determined that by heading further towards the supernatural disturbances? Even if that wouldn't work, surely Fettel could have homed in on Alma with his telepathy or something. Finding Beckett served no purpose, and neither did his death. I could accept a throw-away line mentioning his involvement, but his physical presence in the story was totally unnecessary. It also seemed really weird to even give him any speaking lines, seeing as he was a silent protagonist.

For that matter, Point Man seemed unnecessary. It was a weird transition for me to go from the first game, where you never see his face (even the skin for his character has his face concealed) and never leave his pov, to this game, where you finally see what he looks like and his reactions. And by reactions, I mean that he may as well have been a wooden plank. He sure didn't act like he gave a shit about what was going on around him, judging from the fact that he had the exact same scowl in every cutscene. I can buy him being a silent protagonist because it's just a mechanism to let the player project his own speech into the game, but doesn't he have any emotion? Any opinion about his involvement in all of this? And this is a minor nitpick, but why did we go from him being outside the massive explosion at the end of the first game to getting beat up in a prison at the beginning of this game? What happened in between? Did he get suspended from the F.E.A.R. team for the massive amount of collateral damage he caused? Did Armacham pick him up right after the explosion? He's suppose to be a central character to this franchise, but I'm given nothing to make me care about him.

Fettel is also affected. The entire game he is stressing that they need to find Alma and be at her side (which is related to another nitpick of mine; this game practically bashes our into heads every chance it gets that Fettel and Point Man are brothers and Alma is their mother. You already knew this anyway if you were paying attention during the first game, but at most you only needed to hear it once during the recap, not every fucking time Fettel or an Aramacham commander opens their mouth). But what does he do when he finds her? He tries to eat her, literally cannibalize her flesh (I assume for the purpose of assimilating her psychic strength into his own. Wait, ghosts have flesh?). Why would he do this? And did he honestly think Point Man wouldn't try to stop him? As an aside, Point Man kills Fettel during a cutscene (assuming you earned that ending), making this a missed opportunity for a final boss fight, especially since the actual final boss was a big letdown. Frankly it was predictable and inevitable that the two would come to blows, so why wouldn't there be a big and dramatic boss fight?

Going back to what I said earlier, this game was the least scary of the the entire series. The scariest it ever got was the third or so level in walmart store, when your flashlight malfunctions and you have to move your way by the light of dozens of flickering tv's, with shadowy figures darting across your path. That would have been the perfect place to get ambushed or attacked, but instead the game pussies out and swarms you later in a better lit, less nerve-racking area. Even the horror in the sense of revealing the dark, twisted nature of man is nowhere to be found in this game. In the first game, you gradually learned who Alma was, what she was, what happened to her, and who all was involved. In this game, there are no such revelations. There are no hidden depths of depravity in the name of science, no laptops with backstory for you to uncover. You basically just blast shit while going from point A to point B with the occasional filler cutscene to remind you for the umpteenth time that Fettel is your brother and you need to go find Beckett because you're a good little soldier and damnit good little soldiers follow their orders without question!

Finally, it's my understanding that Armacham invested considerable resources into developing Alma, Fettel and Point Man. But they've also got soldiers that can teleport reinforcements to the battlefield and can phase through solid objects, and they've also got powered armor that comes with a protective force field. Who the hell needs psychic commanders built from traumatized 8 year-olds when you've got all of this Star Trek shit?

If I sit down and think about it some more, I could come up with more rants, but that will have to do for now.

[Edited on July 16, 2011 at 1:25 AM. Reason : better wording]

7/16/2011 1:24:33 AM

dr;tl

7/16/2011 1:36:15 AM