Tense, creepy, and great fun, but a little on the short side.

F.E.A.R. Indeed | F.E.A.R. Director's Edition

pc & video games:


	• F.E.A.R. Director's Edition Windows \| Vivendi Universal, 2005 average customer review:based on 224 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fun but bloody and vulgar

It's a fun game, but the violence is quite gratuitous, and there is far too much swearing. It's entirely unnecessary to hear the worst swears in the English language every other time you start shooting at an enemy. Also, the ending requires you to kill a helpless, unarmed person. Even if he has done evil things, there should be another option to continue the game other than shooting or hitting someone who is not offering resistance.

Basically, it's fun, but check your moral compass.

Tense, creepy, and great fun, but a little on the short side.

Combine the tense military fire-fights of games like Half-Life with the creepy atmosphere of the best Japanese horror films, and you get F.E.A.R.

The only real gripe I have with it is the length. I fully expected to spend a good month or so going through the game (at about an hour a day), but ended up completing the game on the regular difficulty in just over a week.

Everything else about the game is excellent. The debris and gun smoke obscuring the battlefield, the wickedly designed enemy AI (IMO, the best in any FPS game yet), and the well-designed weapons all make for an incredibly satisfying shooter. The little girl ghost will make even the most hardened horror veteran check the dark corners of their home and shut the closet door before going to sleep.

The multi-player mode of the game does not include any of the horror elements from the game, unfortunately. Despite representing only one side of the game, I found the deathmatch levels to be quite well designed, and the pace fast and furious. A downside to multi-player mode is that it REALLY takes a lot out of your system. I'm running a 3.2 GHz CPU with 1 GB RAM and a GeForce 7600GT, and multiplayer COOKS my system. If I play too many consecutive rounds, my PC is so overheated that the game hangs between maps.

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F.E.A.R. Indeed

F.E.A.R. is an FPS, and it does a fine job at that. Next, it's a scary/horror kind of psychological thriller. And the storyline, well, who plays FPS for story line? Although yes, the story line is decent or better.

PROS:
Visuals: Mind you, this game was made in 2005, but even now, 2,3,4 years later, the game still looks good. The slow-mo Max Payne kind of thing, looks absolutely great. The environment is well made and detailed. Almost nearly everything is tangible and can fall, and what-not.

Gameplay:
Well, it's an FPS. The recoil and everything is just like it's supposed to be. Not too much of a variety of weapons. But then again, it isn't Counter-Strike, and being realistic and all, you wouldn't have that much of a variety in an abandoned aerospace building. Don't worry, you won't need that many for this game.

The A.I. is absolutely wonderful. They will try to flank you, take cover, hide in spots waiting for you to come out or waiting for an opening. There was an instance where one went all the way around the building, crouched underneath the garage door, to shoot me from behind. If you're trapped in a single location, they might even nade you, right where you're at.

Storyline:
It keeps you on the edge of your heavily-padded gaming chair with wheels.
Your eyes will be so far into your monitor that by the time you're done, you'll be blind. It intrigues you from the start, and the story unfolds as you go along. The story unfolds in a perfect, subtle, smooth transition way. Not only relying on cut scenes, but through narration, and through blurred vision moments, as well as cut scenes, and more.

The Horror:
Yes there's gore, it's a mature game. It's creepy too. Random boxes will fall, or paint buckets will fall near you. Or you'll hear crying, or you'll see flashes of the evil guy through the corner of your screen walking pass a door. Lots of other things are happening. The main evil guy is a cannibal after all. The evil ghost girl Alma will freak you out, indeed. Prepare yourself.

I highly recommend this game. It leaves your nerves, mind, body, everything just tingling with adrenaline. It will keep you on the edge of your seat, while looking beautiful doing it. Great FPS, with awesome A.I. Great storyline being unfolded in a variety of ways. Great creepy/horror feeling to it. The environment is well-detailed and is very interactable. The slow-mo is well used in this game, and serves a great purpose and it looks great.

Overall: A

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FEAR Alma - but not this game

FEAR is a good, not great, game. It suffers from a kind of triage - it seems that the developers did not have the resources to make every aspect of the game great, so rather than making everything just ok, they decided to allocate all of their resources to certain parts of the game. That manifests itself in a few ways, but the basic breakdown is this: the AI and gameplay are excellent, but they are also repetitive, and the game actually gets easier as it goes on. By the end, you have so much "slo-mo" (ala Max Payne Matrix-esque bullet time), such powerful weapons, and so much health, it is unlikely you will have to load any given area more than once or twice. With the exception of the last two brief levels, the enemies at the end of the game are virtually the same as at the beginning - only now you have massive firepower and practically unlimited slo-mo to combat their basic machineguns. If you enjoy Far Cry/Crysis type games, odds are you are going to have an adjustment period to FEAR. The entire game basically takes place in narrow corridors that lead to larger rooms - sure, there are three slightly different buildings, you go out onto a roof a couple of times, and you might go through an air duct, climb a ladder, or solve a simple puzzle, but basically it's a game with little in the way of variety. The thing is, though, that given all this, FEAR still manages to be a fun, well-made game. No two firefights are completely identical, and the AI is so absurdly good (strategically), that you'll probably find yourself hooked. There is a decent mix of sniping, stealth, and all-out running and gunning, and the enemies do keep you on your toes, even if there are only six basic types, four of which barely appear: soldiers, bots, flying bots, turrets, chameleons (fast moving melee attacks that blend into their environment) and ghosts. Of those six, soldiers make up about 85% of the enemies you'll face. But like I mentioned, those soldiers coordinate their attacks well and keep you on your toes.

FEAR does try to add a horror aspect, but it does it in the vein of Max Payne interactive cutscenes. Unlike Doom 3, for instance, when FEAR gets spooky, you can just run forward for awhile and be reasonably assured of nothing happening to you. You'll fight a couple of battles, then the lights will flicker and you'll see some apparitions, but if you keep progressing, everything will be back to normal without any real frights. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but just don't expect to jump out of your seat often. It's more the creepy variety of horror. The last couple of levels are legitimately scary, and will keep you on the edge of your seat, but I won't spoil those.

In terms of FEAR's fundamentals, it's a solid game. The controls are straightforward (though I found some jerkiness in the first few levels for some reason), and by now you don't need a top of the line computer to run the game. The graphics are still relatively current, but given the simplicity of the environments, that's not hard to do. The weapons are decent and fairly realistic; they aren't very interesting and they become overpowered, though. As I've mentioned, by the middle of the game, you can carry the three most powerful weapons (particle weapon, repeating cannon, and rocket launcher) and kill most soldiers with only one shot. Grenades are mixed in well, which I like, since they add variety to otherwise repetitive battles. There aren't any bosses - the game is actually really realistic despite the paranormal absurdity of its plot.

Overall, this game is definitely worth playing. It does several things extremely well, and will at the very least entertain. If you enjoy its strengths, then you'll love it. If you are more into an open-ended, expansive shooter than FEAR might not be for you.

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Be Afraid...Be Kind Of Afraid...

Like so many games, this game did not live up to the hype surrounding it. It's not a bad game, and at times it can be quite enjoyable (it kept me interested enough so that I played through the whole game). However, there are several major flaws that seriously hamper what could have been one of the best shooters of 2005.

1. There's not enough variety. It's pretty much the same eerily lighted corridors teeming with the same enemies shooting you with the same weapons. After the first two hours or so, I stopped being impressed.

2. Some boxes fall of a shelf and my radio transmitter begins to fade in and out and I'm supposed to be scared? I knew what to expect after the first hour. There are a few good scares, but mostly it falls flat.

3. There's really not a whole lot of strategy to the gameplay. I know, I know. It's a First Person Shooter and it's supposed to be mindless, b@lls-to-the-wall action. But even these aren't that difficult. The A.I. is great, but the slow-mo (while awesome) makes these battle a little too easy. It gets a little (not too much though) tedious.

Not a bad game, overall. Just not the one people have been raving about. But for 10 bucks, why not try it out?

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The F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon Director's Cut DVD-ROM guides you into the heart of horror, in a deep paranormal storyline with first person presentation. A paramilitary force infiltrates a multi-billion dollar aerospace compound taking hostages, but issuing no demands. The government responds by sending in its best special ops teams, only to have them obliterated. A Special Forces team is sent in by the government to contain the situation, but contact is severed as an eerie signal interrupts radio communications. When the interference subsides, the team has been obliterated. Footage of the massacre shows an inexplicable wave of destruction tearing the soldiers apart before they can even react. In light of the desperate situation the F.E.A.R. team is assembled. You are a member of this new units & these are your directives: Eliminate the intruders at any cost. Determine the origin of the signal. And contain this crisis before it spirals out of control. Special Director's Cut Features: Special FEAR comic book, "Making Of F.E.A.R." documentary, developers' roundtable commentary, live-action declassified interviews with Alma, and F.E.A.R. Machinima -- a F.E.A.R. Game contained entirely on a Single DVD Requires 64MB DirectX 9.0 compliant Video card with Pixel shader support

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