Saturday February 11, 2012 6:05 AM AEST

Atomic MPC > User Reviews > Fat_Bodybuilder > User review - FEAR 2: Project Origin

FEAR 2: Project Origin

By Fat_Bodybuilder
15:44 Jan 30, 2009

Excellent frame rates through-out game-play.
Although not completely thrilling, still suspenseful enough to keep you playing, or cause scream and quit out.
Immersive story line.
Detailed, graphic cut-scenes.

Only fully utilises one CPU core.
Graphic Engine overdone causing a 'fake' look.
Relies a little too much on shock factor rather than genuine thrill.
Random hitching - unknown cause.
Gunshot sounds aren't as good as the first F.E.A.R.

First Encounter Assault Recon, one of the most popular games in the 21st Century. Developed by Monolith and pretty much your normal first person shooter where you kill or be killed. What differentiates a game from other games is everything else besides the main idea of killing to survive – such things are story line, intensity, graphics – basically the entire atmosphere of a game.

The first thing you’ll note about the game is that it includes our favourite character, Elma. In the introduction, a small briefing is given about Elma and her life. Now, I’m not going to comment on whether the original (supposed) antagonist being used again in the second game is a good thing or a bad thing, but I can say that I do get sick of movies or TV shows which present the same bad guy every season, I’m thinking “Can you just kill him already??”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th6knb8mnkc

The graphics engine is something that is hard to talk about. They’ve clearly put a lot of effort into the eye candy, however most would say they’ve gone about it the wrong way, as it looks “fake” rather than life like (which is what most gamers are hoping to get to). In the screen shot shown you can clearly see that the engine is very “pretty”, and having a bright, gloss screen is definitely going to give the player a different atmosphere to the other gamers out there. See screenshots at the bottom to get an idea of the graphics engine.

One of the things we love to see in today’s modern gaming industry is the usage of modern gaming components; this would be things like multiple graphics cards, lots of RAM, use of multiple CPU cores. One of the tests I ran was to see the CPUs usage while running the game, the results were not as I expected. Unfortunately it’s apparent that the game only properly utilised one of the cores in the CPU, the other was slightly in use, but because it was not symmetrical, it shows that the game has not been designed with modern hardware in mind. The screenshot below shows the CPU utilisation.

http://www.pc-guides.net/fearCPUusage.png

It runs extremely well on our testing machine, getting a constant 60 frames per second. However, in certain places it gets a tad hitch, which lasts too long in our eyes – it’s thought that it’s because there is only 512mb graphics memory in the system – however after talking to others with much more graphical memory, the issue was still clearly apparent. This could be anything from drivers to genuinely incapable hardware. The scenes and movement are very life-like, bodies are not in the square shape that they once were in the original FEAR engine – this is good.

In the beginning you can immediately see bodies being flung around as if there is a super natural force around. The gun your start off with is a major disappointment, as one of the factors which kept me playing the original fear were those deep, loud, intense gun sounds. Here it’s a puny laser sounding gun which should just shoot water in my opinion. “Pew pew pew.”

The difficulty of the game is not one to be taken lightly, as even on normal setting, you will have your hands full. I’m not completely sure what it is about the AI but it can take up to 3 shotgun shells at point-blank range to kill a single enemy. Ammo is not a problem because collect it from the enemies you kill, however it’s almost annoying when having to shoot someone twice, only to be shot again by that person once you turn to shoot someone behind you, thinking that the guy you just head-shot is dead.

Unfortunately it is already apparent that the game relies far too much on shock factors than genuine scariness. Walking around the place, all of a sudden, something appears and, to be completely honest, that’s more annoying than scary. Hopefully when the full game is released, the other levels will have some parts of it that are intense, scary and classically thrilling.

So far the game looks like it will be a good title, not as good as the original, but still something to look forward to. I would have preferred more realistic graphics, but the pretty fake ones are not bad, to say the least. If it was personally up to me, after playing this demo I would put money towards buying the full game.

Test System:
Core2Duo E8500 @ 4.0GHz (421 x 9.5)
4GB DDR2 Crucial Ballistix RAM
Gigabyte X38-DS4
Sapphire HD 4870
WD Caviar 640GB
Windows Vista Ultimate x86

Benchmarks: Frames Per Second (Higher is better)
Minimum: 10
Average: 55
Maximum: 62
(Benchmarks run at 1920 x 1200)

Screenshots: (Note images are in PNG format and around 1.3mb in size, at a resolution of 1920 x 1200)
http://www.pc-guides.net/fear2/fear2-1.jpg
http://www.pc-guides.net/fear2/fear2-2.jpg
http://www.pc-guides.net/fear2/fear2-3.jpg
http://www.pc-guides.net/fear2/fear2-4.jpg
http://www.pc-guides.net/fear2/fear2-5.jpg

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Atomic Magazine

Issue: 133 | February, 2012

Atomic is a magazine aimed squarely at computer enthusiasts, gamers, and serious PC upgraders.

Every month we bring you the latest reviews of new technology and PC components, in depth features on everything from overclocking to console hacking, and gaming previews and interviews.

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