"F.E.A.R."

I'm a believer in the rush one gets watching horror flicks. I've also been a big fan of first-person shooters, starting with the birth of the gaming genre itself, Wolfenstein 3D. So I've been lusting after F.E.A.R., a new horror-themed first-person shooter (loosely based on one of my favourite horror flicks, The Ring) since its release some time ago. I finally got my chance this weekend, so here's my review of the experience.

The bad news first: F.E.A.R. is no Half-Life 2. But fear not (no pun intended), F.E.A.R. has its share of interesting features.

Weaving a horror theme into a first-person shooter is no easy task by any standards. Doom integrated gore into its storyline, the same way Half-Life integrated a carefully constructed and believable, if dystopic, view of the future. However, the creators of F.E.A.R. come admirably close to perfection with their phantasmagorical take on first-person shooters.

The first thing you notice are the lighting effects that contribute immensely to the intentionally macabre atmosphere. Your own shadow suddenly looms up as you walk past a lamp, just like it would in reality, but it does take some getting used to to see it rendered so faithfully in the game. Swinging lamps send shadows of different objects flying in all directions. The flashlight battery runs out pretty quickly, forcing you to grope around in the dark many a time while it recharges, but this is not a missing feature; it is a carefully calculated method to immerse the player entirely into the game, darkness and all.

Besides lighting, the other big feature is the ability to go slo-mo, Matrix style. In the opening scene you are credited with having reflexes that are "off the charts"; this is manifest as a mode in which time slows down to a crawl, and you can surgically target your unlucky enemies. Sportspersons would call this "being in the zone". Bullets stream by leaving behind straight lines of disturbed air. The voices of the enemy soldiers drop down a couple of octaves to reflect the expanded time axis, and as you return to normal time to survey the damage, the low sounds of empty cartridges rolling on the floor smoothly return to their normal pitch.

Along with the outrageously intelligent enemy AI, this makes every skirmish completely unique and an audio-visual extravaganza. The teams of enemy soldiers act like they really are part of a team, lobbing grenades before advancing, waiting around corners while you fire and advancing cautiously while you reload or retreat, screaming for backup when their numbers grow thin, and never ever standing still while firing at you. I played the game at the lowest difficulty level and yet without the slow-motion mode I would never have been able to get past the enemy defenses.

This brings me to the other superb elements of realism in F.E.A.R.. You can only carry three guns at any given time, which forces you to make a tough decisions throughout the game based on each weapon's trade-offs. When you target enemies and shoot, the crosshair jumps wildly to reflect the recoil; this makes taking out enemies much harder as you fight to keep your target in the line of fire. Running and firing makes aiming even more difficult. You can enter an 'aiming' mode where aiming is easier, but your speed of movement is consequently decreased.

Climbing down ladders forces you to turn around and use both hands, and your field of view is limited, too. This is in stark contrast to most other first-person shooters where you are seemingly magnetically attached to the ladders while still being able to wield your weapons and see in all directions. So, obviously, a gunfight from a ladder is impossible in F.E.A.R., which makes a lot of sense.

Another real nice feature is the ability to lob grenades with a single key-tap, without having to explicitly switch to grenades as a weapon. This is extremely important to your survival in encounters with large numbers of soldiers.

So, where's the downside, you ask? Firstly, I had to play this game on a decent machine with a GeForce 6600GT and an AMD64 3000+ with 1G of RAM. All the graphical niceties were off or set to a low level and yet my frame rates were not very impressive. Half-Life 2 scales much better to older hardware. Secondly, the facial animation and humans in general were not very good. Again, my standard of reference here is Half-Life 2. Last, but not least, were the actual elements of horror in the game. Sadly enough, the screams, hallucinations, pools of blood, and mysteriously appearing and disappearing phantoms of people were a little bit too repetitive and their initial effect wore off pretty quick.

In spite of its few shortcomings, F.E.A.R. does manage to push many of the boundaries for first-person shooters. A follow-up is planned, and once you put the pieces together, the story does seem intriguing enough to warrant interest in the next title. Recommended!