AI, gameplay

Which brings us to the AI. The characters in the game are not only good at reacting to the player’s motions, but they take the offensive themselves. Whereas other games can boast that the AI will respond to a grenade being thrown and take cover, or hide behind a counter while reloading, FEAR’s AI is actively aggressive. Let’s go back to the example with the two guards in the office with the glass window and one in the dark corridor. The dark corridor opened fire, pinning me down while I fired back. The office guards immediately reacted, one fired through the glass at me, where my cover was ineffective and the third leaped over the railing to assault me from the side. That is why I quicksave every 37 seconds.

FEAR borrows a page from Max Payne’s bullet time and portrays this as your character’s almost superhuman reflexes. Like bullet time, it is a short effect, but it slowly recharges by itself rather than needing the player to kill to recharge it. Your character doesn’t move any faster but it’s possible to react better to your opponents – including spotting, aiming and dodging.

The game is quite gory but not to the extent of, say, Soldier of Fortune. The worst we’ve managed to do is blow someone’s head off, and that took a point-blank shotgun blast to the face. While FEAR doesn’t go for hyper-realism in terms of damage the player and his enemies can take, it definitely leans more towards the realistic end of the scale. Of course, there are still medpacks and handy suits of body armor laying around.

646MB may seem like a lot to download for 15 minutes of gameplay, but if you’ve ever wanted to see what your Radeon X800, GeForce 6800 or GeForce 7800 is capable of, if you’ve ever needed to tell the wife “look, see, I didn’t spend $500 for nothing”, this 15 minutes of glory is it.


Who knew that F.E.A.R. stood for Game of the Year, because right now it just shot straight to the top of the expectations list, leap-frogging past Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2. All that Monolith and Vivendi have to do is make sure that the rest of the game is as impressive as the demo.