Daniel Floyd recently wrote a heartfelt plea for non-writers to stop writing stories for their games. Hire professional writers, he said, as they know what works and what doesn’t. With that in mind, I hope he never plays Project Origin as he’s liable to break down and cry.
So Project Origin is the first direct sequel to 2005’s F.E.A.R, it’s also the first follow up to be developed by renowned developer Monolith. Two expansion packs were created by Timegate but they’re best ignored to be honest. Each of these projects has featured several common features: Scary little girls, armies of clones for you to shoot and uncountable stretches of corridor.
So what’s changed in Project Origin? Well, the character you play has a name this time which is surprisingly helpful. Characters no longer skirt unconvincingly around your identity as they did in FEAR by calling you “buddy”.
There’s also been a shift away from the grey corridors – there are more colours on display this time around, the environments have genuine personality. There are also odd sections of daylight which adds even more variety.
I’ve stalled for long enough, though. It’s time for the unpleasant truth. Project Origin, on PC at least, is really not very good.
I’ll start with what it does well: The graphics are very good. The environments and models are well rendered and there are an impressive number of animations for the enemy soldiers. It’s also surprisingly well optimised; I experienced no slowdown even when things were getting frenetic during the fire fights.
The horror elements are also done spectacularly well this time around. There are occasional scares during your time running around gunning people down but these are often rather forced. Where the game shines is in the hallucinations projected into your brain by Alma, the evil little girl hounding you everywhere you go.
In one recurring vision, you are in a field of corn. At the top of a hill in the distance, a little girl in a red dress plays on a swing. Your vision pulsates, the sun beats down on you harder and harder, the music swells- Monolith have taken an approach similar to that of J-Horror which is to not use cheap scares when you just as easily instil a feeling of awe and dread in your audience.
I really can’t praise the horror elements enough… There’s a focus on taking an idyllic setting and twisting it into something horrible. The sound design and music has clearly been designed to compliment this – there are plenty of screeching strings and unsettling chords.
Unfortunately, the horror elements take place in between the frequent fire fights and it’s there where things start to go wrong.
One of the biggest issues with the game is the story, which I mentioned earlier. Most of the story is told by finding data discs, which contain lines of text detailing the back story and the current actions of the various characters. This is worse than the audio recorders in Bioshock, at least they played audio to you. Here you have to stop whatever it is you’re doing, breaking the immersion in the process, and read lines of text to understand what’s going on. Is this really the best way Monolith could think of to explain the story?
The rest of the story is told in a more conventional manner by the characters. Calling it a story may be a little generous, though. You are trying to find Alma and stop her. Why it’s your responsibility is never really explained. Apparently you are the only Delta Force team within a hundred miles.
Even if you could forgive these faults, the biggest issue with the story is that it’s really badly written. I’m not talking plot holes, here; I’m talking about truly atrocious dialogue. One of the characters describes Alma’s tenaciousness and says she’ll chase you as if you’re “free pizza at an anime convention”. Can I take a minute to remind you this is supposed to be a horror game, not Dude, Where’s My Car?
Project Origin also employs my all time least favourite game device which is having your character never speak. This is supposedly so the player can project their personality onto the blank slate but in reality it kills any sense of immersion whenever a character talks to you and you just stare back at them.
The gameplay itself is another matter. I should point out at this point that I do respect Monolith- they have responded to criticisms of the original FEAR and genuinely tried to improve the game. Unfortunately, more of then than not, they have chosen to improve the wrong aspects of the gameplay.
For example, one criticism of the original FEAR that it consisted of nothing but completely interchangeable grey corridors. Monolith have responded to this, not by removing the corridors, but by painting all the corridors different colours. This means that the gameplay is as disappointingly linear as it was in the original but has the added bonus of the fantastic atmosphere being killed by all the lurid colours knocking around the place. I came across a fork lift truck painted half blue, half red.
A slightly bizarre sci fi theme has also been introduced. Your character wears futuristic goggles that feed video back to his superiors, which is fair enough. Unfortunately, this means that you play with a glowing blue line framing everything that happens in the game world. This becomes somewhat distracting. The enemies sport similar goggles which means their visors glow brightly, enabling you to spot them from across a football field, this doesn’t exactly promote a tense atmosphere.
The guns also feel futuristic, and not in a good way. The two machine guns present look and feel quite good but the shotguns lack punch and the laser weapons that get introduced later in the game are ineffective and silly.
There are a host of other problems as well- the AI has been stripped down so it’s far too easy, even on the hardest difficulty setting. This renders the ability to slow down time oddly pointless. The game is still far too linear, in spite of occasional open areas and the multiplayer is completely forgettable.
What really saddens me about Project Origin is… There is the seed of a good game here. The horror elements are fantastic as I mentioned earlier but some of the enemies hint at something much more interesting and much more fun. Late in the game you encounter semi-invisible assassins. I won’t spoil what they look like or what they do as the encounters with them are some of the only fun bits in the game but suffice it to say the tension and paranoia from the original FEAR returns in a rush as soon as they appear. If only Monolith had spent more time developing enemies like this in stead of creating hours of bland and disappointing gunplay.
There are also sections where you stride around the city in an armoured mechanical walker. These are fairly boring as you tear through anything with a pulse in seconds. I was getting ready to slate these sections as I thought it would have been much more fun to just let you take out the waves of enemies that attack you during these sections on foot. In the second of the vehicle sections, though, my walker got shot up so badly it shut down. I was expecting a game over screen but no- my character simply got out of the walker and I was able to continue on foot.
Suddenly I was having fun- waves of enemies attacked me, I was under fire from dozens of troops firing rockets at me. I had to dodge from cover to cover to cover, firing blindly at anything that moved. Unfortunately, you’re forced back into lienar encounters with small numbers of enemies shortly afterwards but at least I was able to pass on some advice: If you do buy this game, play the mech sections through without the mech. It’s much more fun.
It genuinely saddens me that Project Origin has all these faults. Partly because I loved the original FEAR but mostly because there really is a good game hidden in there somewhere. If Monolith had spent more time scaring the crap out of us and less time making the shooting sections generic, tensionless and far, far too easy Project Origin could have been a classic. As it is, it’s crippled. Horror fans will be disappointed because of the lame FPS elements and FPS fans will be disappointed because it’s no-where near as good as the original FEAR, let alone more recent efforts like Far Cry 2 and Crysis Warhead.
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