F.E.A.R. Extraction Point

So this is a thing.

I was planning on writing about the game while playing, but it took me under 4 hours to beat, so it was over before I even felt it had started.

So is it worth playing? Honestly no.

The game actually has less resolution and graphics settings than the original even when it's built on the same engine. Also I don't think it brought anything new to the table. There are only a few additions to gameplay. In comparison to the original you can now melee attack doors open, there's a deployable turret that breaks the A.I. and a few new weapons: a minigun and a laser rifle, that see only limited use.

I actually lowered the game's difficulty to low at about the half-point because I got bored with it and just wanted it to be over. There are a few new enemies but one of them is just a ghost version of an existing enemy and two are bullet sponges that have bad A.I.

There is a bigger robot walker that can be beat by aforementioned turret. Throw one on the ground and the enemy ignores you until it has destroyed the turret. This ignoring behaviour applies to every enemy in the game but since these things are kinda like minibosses it's more apparent in these sections.

The game starts where the original game left off and has some more open spaces for the first hour of gameplay when you're going through the city. The city part of the game was maybe the most enjoyable of the entire experience since after that the game gets a bit trippy.

The creepshow parts of the game are more intense and the atmosphere throughout the game is scarier than the originals so it's got that going for it. But when I say it's scary there are indeed some good jump scares and times when it feels oppressing but way too often it's scary in a way that a three legged moose riding a unicycle on LSD is scary. First you're scared for all the wrong reasons, then you're confused, and when you calm down you start wondering who thought that was a good idea?

In all honesty there isn't much content to be found in the expansion. Just more of the same and I got bored with it really fast. The ending was abrupt and uneventful just a rooftop fight with a bunch of basic enemies and a clichéd ending where the main character is knocked out as the Bad Guy talks to you as you fade in to the credits.

I think I'll tackle F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate next and after that take a break from the series.

Thanks for reading!

Keep on truckin'

F.E.A.R.

Not the first game I played through, but the latest one so this is the easiest for me to write about.

I decided on a format where I shall write a short summary here at the top so a reader can get a fast idea about my thoughts on the game and whether they might be interested in reading more.

What did I enjoy about the game? Intense action scenes
Dislikes? You're forced to play in a set way for a scripted events
Is it a good game? I've played better ones but there's many that are worse

So my first impression of the game was that it was surprisingly good looking for a game that was released 10 years ago. The aesthetics were pleasing and the visuals were just all around good all things considered. I had a bit of a framerate issue because of a bug regarding HID-compliant devices, but after sorting that out it was a smooth experience throughout the game.

I'm gonna try writing my thoughts from when I was first playing the game and experiencing things and not with the knowledge I gained from playing through the game.

*SPOILERS AHOY*

The game starts out with a video of a guy that is supposed to be the villain of the game. Creepy atmosphere, cannibalism, ok, bad guy is bad. Wait, why are those soldiers just standing there while the obvious bad guy is eating a person? Not gonna explain that? Ok then. Bad guys henchmen are apparently loyal no matter what.

Introductory level and tutorial, nothing much to say here. Apparently I'm a soldier and new to the group. We're going somewhere to investigate something because the Bad Guy is there doing Bad Things.

So I get attacked by soldiers, I kill said soldiers. I'm told I have a bullet-time button, heightened reflexes, that makes fighting incredibly easy, I resolve not to use said "Slow-Mo" mode because it felt like cheating and made everything annoyingly slow.

The game doesn't tell me why I have superior reflexes. Maybe it's something in this setting that everyone has, or maybe just the operatives in F.E.A.R. have it? I decide it's only a game gimmick they didn't bother to invent technobabble for and move on.

My first real gameplay regarded issue was with the gunplay. The first time I shot a weapon it felt off somehow. Since the projectiles exist in the game and they travel very slow when compared to other games I've played the shooting part of this First Person Shooter felt wrong on some innate level to me. It took me about an hour of gameplay to get used to the basic weapons and firing them since they felt laggy and unresponsive.

Creepy stuff happens during the level that slows down the game world and I'm stuck getting hit in the face with the plot-hammer in a scene that is supposed to be scary but just annoys me. The traumas from walking slowly while getting forced exposition on me from other games is the creepiest part of the scene.

As I advance in the game I see a pattern emerge: there's an action scene with a lot of enemies and it gets intense, after that there's a cooling down period where you search for your next objective (without a map and with only a vague idea what you're supposed to be doing). During the cool-off period you will be fed exposition through objects in the game like laptops and answering machines and also from your allies through the comm-system.

In between action scenes you will also have visions that are supposed to be scary but for the life of me I don't get how they are supposed to freak me out. Maybe a little girl walking towards you with gore all around you is scary to some, but I was there to witness my daughter being born and I can tell you: that, if anything, is frightening.

And hey, it has the same setup. Gore and a girl coming toward you slowly. But what F.E.A.R. can't add to their experience is the imminent loss of freedom, the future first boyfriend, the dread of teen-angst and the forfeiture of your wallet.

Around the third or fourth Intervention, as the levels are called, I noticed that I was forced to start using "Slow-Mo". The introduction of the first bullet-sponge enemy made me use it 'cause the fighting got really hectic and I just felt the need to slow things down to gauge my surroundings better. I think that is exactly what it is for in the game. The fights are always with numerous enemies and they tend to get a little tougher as the game goes on so you need a way to make sense of all the chaos. This is fine in my book, the fights are fun, even if a bit repetitive because they are all set the same way: tight areas where enemies swarm, lots of cover, explosions and shouting.

Even though the fight scenes  were enjoyable I did notice that they started to take me out of the game and I realized it was because I felt more like playing a shooting gallery than an FPS. The "Slow-Mo" takes you out of the frantic fighting and you start to carefully aim for the enemies heads as they pop out from behind cover like in shooting galleries. In one level there actually is a classic shooting gallery portion where you're on a rooftop shooting at enemies that pop in to view from windows on a building in front of you.

Throughout the game I can upgrade my health and reflexes with blue and yellow injections. At no point is it explained why I can upgrade my characters abilities with injections of glowing liquids and it really bothered me throughout the game. Is this a normal thing in this world? Why doesn't the game tell me I should try to find these things before I actually use one? Who makes a reflex-injection-gun and how does one get made? Can I have on in strawberry flavour?

At a point in the game I noticed that I could stray off from where I was required to go and I could find dormant enemies that were invulnerable. It was clear that I hadn't triggered the required script to bring them to life. I felt a bit cheated because I should at least gain an advantage and be able to kill enemies I find prematurely in a game that lets this happen, instead I was now completely taken out of the game and have to go somewhere else just to find a script that triggers the next thing I need to do.

Also there were times when partly invisible enemies would run past you and they are invulnerable during that time. Apparently they are only meant to scare you. To me it was really annoying that you can use up a chunk of your Slow-Mo just to empty a clip on an enemy only to notice that you cant harm them. After such an event you are also all too aware that you're going to have to kill those enemies after they attack you in the near future.

I felt the end of the game was a bit anti-climactic but it might also have to do with the fact that I had stopped caring about the plot or any part of the story pretty early on. The storytelling is so loose because the writer wanted to keep you in the dark and build an atmosphere where you're just a lone gunman in the middle of some horror story that he forgot to tell the player anything that might actually inform you of what is going on, what the stakes are or who it even is that you're fighting. After a while I just dozed off into a kind of "kill everyone, find the next door or switch you need, wait for the creepy scene to end, kill everyone again" routine.

Even at the end when you get the big revelation that the Bad Guy is your brother it didn't really phase me. I simply had no emotional investment in any of the characters least of all the silent protagonist. To top it off the final confrontation with the Bad Guy I've been chasing the entire game after boils down to being just another creepy scene where I shoot one bullet at a stationary target. I'm surprised to notice that then the game still continues and I have to find Mother.

So to sum up the end: I get no boss fight with the only clear Bad Guy of the game, I have to find and kill a little girl who isn't a little girl who is my mother who was killed but still lives and has been kept in a vault by my grandfather.

Ok.

When we get to Alma the game turns all Xen on me. I run away from a self-destructing base like it was the 80's and fight some sort of soulzombies that take one hit to destroy. Then the real final confrontation just before the end is against Alma herself as she slowly walks towards you and lets you shoot her in the face with no resistance. Oh she can kill you, you just have to walk up to her for her to do that. Great end-game design guys! All that practice with the numerous guns and Slow-Mo really paid off here where my best weapon of choice is the starting pistol because of the fast reload animation and I can't even use the Slow-Mo.

Well at least it wasn't a quick time event so there's that.

F.E.A.R. was an ok game, it hasn't really aged well as games have moved on a lot in storytelling and just overall design. The graphics and sound effects are decent even still but I found the music department lacking. It was just jarring to have quiet ambient music designed for a horror aesthetic when the game itself is so action packed. The enemies are jus run of the mill soldiers and the AI isn't up to modern standards even though I can believe that it must have been amazing for it's time. At the end of the game I still don't really understand why everyone wants the protagonist dead or what his organization does and why there are troops sent in helicopters to the areas where all of this is happening but hey, it's a game. Sometimes a game just needs mooks to kill so you can feel a hero for mowing them down.

Thank for reading! I think I'm going to write the next post while I'm playing and publish it when it's finished so it will have a more hands-on feel to it.

Next game: F.E.A.R. Extraction Point.

Let's do this!

So here's the thing:

Many gamers have this problem with steam that, with all the amazing sales and humble bundle deals, your Steam's game library is getting quite huge. A lot of the time all you do is play your favorite multiplayer games, like Dota 2 or Team Fortress 2, or you play through the current top triple-A title like Skyrim and when you're done with that you go on to the next thing. All the while you will never go back to your back-catalogue of, often times awesome, games but you will still keep on nurturing and growing your game library through the sales and what-not.

But I've become recently unemployed and for a time I spent my extra time getting things done at the house that I'd been avoiding and spending more time with my family, but still it's fun to play on my downtime and you tend to run out of chores to do around the house when you have so much free time.

One day I was sitting on my computer and thinking about what to do I browsed through my steam library thinking how I have all these games but I've played through only a few of them. Most of my time went to Dota 2 at that time and let's face it, it's not an optimal game to play if you have a family and other responsibilities.

I decided that I shall play through each and every one of my games that have a campaign or a game mode that has a starting point and an end. This means that games like Batman: Arkham City get played but something like Guardians of Middle Earth does not, for obvious reasons.

So why did I decide to write about this? Well I like writing and I also noticed that I have a lot to say about many of the games I've been playing so I thought I'll just do what feels natural to me: write about the experiences I've been having. Hopefully someone read something and finds something useful out of these texts at some point.

There are some rules that I set myself for this project:

1. The objective of the playthrough is the main campaign! So achievements are not important, no collectibles or side-quests unless I really like the game and truly want to be a completionist with that particular game.
2. No DLC playthrough unless it provides more end-game content relevant to the storyline or content necessary for a storyline that spans multiple games. This means that, yes I play through the DLC for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, but I don't play X - Com: Enemy Within.
3. If a game has stand-alone add-ons, such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution - The Missing Link, they get played.
4. I will start the game with Normal difficulty unless I'm sure I will enjoy it more with a higher one.
5. This is for FUN, if the game feels too frustrating I will lower the difficulty.
6. Focus on one game at a time.
7. Family first!

Thank you for reading!

Let's get to it then.