Fear 2 impressions part 2

I played another couple of hours of Fear 2 last night and the news really isn't' that good.

It should be pointed out that the PC Zone review (IE one of the two publications I trust) says that the levels do get better after the one I'm currently on but we shall see.

Anyway, these are my observations:

1) It turns out, contrary to what I said earlier, you can look down the iron sights. The control to do this was squirreled away in a menu somewhere. Oddly, since finding it, I never really use it because the guns are so accurate and the enemies tend not to dodge much.

2) The slow motion this time round is utterly pointless. There are several reasons for this, mainly linked to lack of difficulty surrounding the game but the big one is:

3) enemies don't move in squads this time. You encounter them in ones and twos. This comes damn close to killing the game. The big reason the AI in FEAR worked is you'd get flanked whilst concentrating on one or two enemies. They'd work together. This is completely absent this time round.

4) whilst we're on the subject of enemies, I've encountered three types so far:

Human soldiers: Who have bright blue glowing goggles
Clone soldiers: Who have bright yellow glowing goggles
Failed experiments: The fast moving melee attackers every game tries to make awesome.

now. I can't over state how much having soldiers with glowing goggles kills the atmosphere. They look like they should be in a 70's camp Sci fi film ... This impression isn't helped by the glowing blue line that surrounds your HUD.


5) There's a character called Snake Fist - who wins the award for all time worst character name.

6) There's a line of dialogue that wins the award for Most Ridiculous Simile in any mainstream publication:

When describing Alma, the ghostly antagonist, a character says she'll come after you "like free pizza at an anime convention" followed by the phrase "she can smell you and wants to consume you"

This is why Daniel Floyd is always pleading for non writers to STOP trying to write for games.


7) The colour scheme is completely fucked.

So the offices in FEAR were very, very samey. The reason for this was they actually looked like offices. Here, there are colours everywhere. Railings are green, blue floor tiles - I came across a forklift truck where the bottom half was blue and the top half was red.

Now, one the one hand it's nice to see a game where the colour palette isn't made up entirely of shades of grey and brown but on the other- WHAT FUCKING WORLD DO THESE PEOPLE LIVE IN? Have you ever in your life ever seen a red and blue forklift truck? That's the sort of thing I'd expect to see in a street racing game, not a horror shooter.




Monolith have responded to criticisms of FEAR, not by removing the corridors (which they should have done) but by trying to make all the corridors different by painting them all lurid colours.

I really, really hope this game gets better because at the moment my finger is hovering over the delete key.