F.E.A.R.

There is so much in this game, yet it is crafted with brilliant restraint. Ben Mansill cowers in F.E.A.R.

The base ingredient for F.E.A.R. is a bog standard, but top quality Special Forces themed shooter. To that, Monolith have added some remarkable icing on the cake, but if the core of the game doesn’t hold up, the rest falls fl at. Fear not, for the game is built upon a solid foundation to which magic is layered thick.

You are a spec forces badarse sent in to investigate the curious goings on at a major aerospace and weapons technology company.

That means walking around shooting enemy spec forces badarses, mostly in the corridors and confined spaces. This is one of those games that is gritty and realistic. Hardcore and humourless. Monolith games have a certain feel, and personally I’ve always loved them.

The company knows how to pace combat so it’s never repetitive. F.E.A.R. mixes it up with tense exploration punctuated by intense bursts of adrenalin combat. The core game is never adulterated by elements that are too often inserted in computer games to make them “interesting”, rather you are simply a fella with a few guns clearing an area.

This raw simplicity really does make you feel like you’re just there to do a job.

Combat is especially meaty as a result. The weapons feel more realistic than “gamey” and killing is a visceral splatterfest that’s more cold and shocking that gung-ho grin and let rip. Bad guys are armoured and take some hits before going down, they will jerk and recoil as they take hits, not unlike Bonny and Clyde in the frightening final scene from that film. When they do die you know it because their guts explode out and everything around them is soaked in a physics-engine driven splatterage of gore.

Upon that core F.E.A.R. gives you three thick dollops of icing that make it the stunner it is. Dollop one is the “Slo-mo” effect. Yes, it’s bullet time. There’s nothing fancy about it, just hold CTL and time slows until the little bar runs dry – which starts at about 10 seconds, then extends through the game by collecting boosters. And it’ll save your skin many times.

Gun recoil is controllable in slo-mo, very useful, and you can take out 3-4 baddies in one 10 sec slo session. When it runs out and snaps back to real time it’s abrupt and explosive. Slo-mo also highlights the killer AI in the game, which is the second dollop.