FEAR 2: Project Origin Review

It’s pretty obvious what you’re letting yourself in for. The game is called FEAR – the developer's intentions are crystal clear: they want to scare you. And the box art is dominated by an ethereal little girl - Alma - who looks suspiciously like that freaky Japanese lass from The Ring.

The biggest tell, however, comes before you’ve even started playing. Whenever a game prompts you to “adjust the brightness until the onscreen symbol is barely visible”, you just know that the next 6-8 hours will be spent bracing yourself for the next cheap scare in a dimly lit corridor. That’s not to say it isn’t fun though.

Becket, the protagonist you control, is introduced via a lurid hallucination which sees him following the flickering ghost of Alma through a ruined city. You wake from this sepia-drenched nightmare surrounded by your squad. You’re all in an armoured combat vehicle, trundling towards your first mission - investigating a Penthouse for supernatural activity.

As with all the interior settings in FEAR, the Penthouse is a sprawling complex of meticulously detailed rooms and corridors. You’ll find yourself pushing open door after door, never knowing quite what you’ll find behind each of them. You might stumble upon an empty bathroom complete with tiny, complimentary bars of soap. Or you might uncover a blood spattered laundry room and a severed head bouncing around in one of the washing machines. It’s the pornographic attention to detail that evokes a real ‘lived-in’ quality to your surroundings. Which makes tearing them with up your machine gun all the more satisfying.

With a control set-up pilfered directly from COD 4, carving up the enemy is never a chore. Hold L1 to stare down the barrel of your gun and R1 to pump out the rounds – simple. The D-Pad is fully utilised with each direction performing a crucial function: UP – torch, RIGHT – toggle weapons, DOWN – Medikit, LEFT – toggle grenades. It all works well and after half an hour feels pretty intuitive. You’ll stick to the weapons you know and love, namely the machine guns, shotguns and sniper rifles. The Rocket Launcher is cumbersome and the futuristic lasers are ineffective and no fun to use. As are the grenades – it’s simply too hard to judge where they're going to land.

The games biggest weakness, however, is the tiny cast of enemies. You’re either shooting an identikit soldier or dodging a mutated freak. There’s no real sense of character, like the brutes in Halo 3 who constantly shift their group dynamic, call out to each other and try everything in their power to flush you out. Okay, the occasional soldier may upend a table for cover and robotically bleat out a phrase like, ‘he’s behind the crates’, but that’s about the extent of their limited repertoire. The only characters worth noting are, unsurprisingly, the freaky supernatural ones.

Replica Assassins are small ninja-like soldiers – very fast and extremely agile. You’ll only notice them when their cloaking device temporarily distorts the space around them. Happily, you have just the thing needed to catch them out. A quick tap of Y initiates your ‘reflex’ skill – this is essentially a device that slows down time. Once activated you’ll be able to see these deadly little assassins in all their balletic grace and beauty – more importantly you’ll now be able to blast them in the face.

Scarier still are the Remnants. Protruding from their bloated bodies are glowing red tentacles which they use as strings to puppeteer nearby corpses into attacking you. Watching these horrific marionettes dance to the tune of their malevolent master is quite a sight. Just make sure you keep your distance.

FEAR can be characterised by its painfully long segments of quiet exploration and its sudden, chaotic bouts of supernatural horror. The schizophrenic back and forth between lengthy spells of silence and short bursts of terror really jangle the nerves. In one sweat-inducing set-piece you’ll find yourself armed only with a torch - a cruel imposition and no mistake. Hardcore veterans of the FPS genre will feel especially vulnerable without the comforting sight of a shotgun barrel in front of them. It’s a nice twist to an established formula. Any game that strips you of your weapons and forces you down a corpse-strewn corridor with just a failing torch for protection knows exactly how to elicit those atavistic feelings of fear we’d simply rather not experience.

All of FEAR’s locations seem to blur seamlessly into one another. It feels like you’re trapped inside a labyrinthine underground complex, and after a while it all becomes a little oppressive and overbearing. Think Fallout 3, specifically those deserted underground subways, and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect. When you’ve spent 8 hours searching yet another empty room by the light of your torch, you start to feel the clammy hand of claustrophobia clawing at your throat - not pleasant. But perhaps FEAR’s dev team would argue that this crushing oppressiveness has precisely the intended effect.

Verdict
Best approached with the lights off and the sound up. As a £5.95 rental from blockbusters, FEAR 2 is an absolute bargain.