The AI

Enemies don’t just do this occasionally, either. In virtually every battle, enemies tried to keep me pinned down from the front with gunfire and the odd grenade while one or two of their buddies flanked me. This usually had the desired effect of pushing me out into the main attack and exposing myself to withering fire, or trying to fight on two fronts simultaneously (which isn’t a good idea; just ask the Germans). And since their weapons did just as much damage to me as mine did to them…well, you get the picture. This isn’t quite a “two shots and you’re dead” tactical shooter, but it’s awfully close. Charging enemies in the open is suicidal, even though you might as well be fighting in a hospital given the crazy number of health packs and permanent health- and reflex-boosting stims that the game dishes out.

Coordinated attacks also forced me to use the slo-mo battle system. Since you’re an operative with incredible reflexes, you get to do this Matrix/Max Payne thing where you slow the action down for a few seconds. This of course makes it much easier to perforate opponents. At first I found the whole idea absurd, and almost too much of an obvious ripoff to even bother with. But then I started getting flanked, and soon got into the spirit of things. I found it very tough to survive even some of the early battles in the game without using slo-mo on a regular basis, so I didn’t really have much choice.

I didn’t get nearly as much satisfaction out of the melee combat moves. While I appreciated being able to slap around enemies with martial arts skills, it was all but impossible to actually use them because if the bad guys got close enough to take a punch, I was almost always shot dead in seconds. Every time I tried to lay a beating on somebody, I wound up like that poor joker with the sword in the first Indiana Jones movie. Combat is just too realistic to be taking place in close quarters very often, especially when the victims of your kung-fu fighting are packing serious heat.


The shadow knows!
F.E.A.R. also stands apart from the pack when it comes to graphics, but you probably already know that given that we’ve got an article on the front page right now about how the game engine arm-wrestles video cards into submission. For what it’s worth, I got excellent frame rates at 1024x768, thanks to a GeForce 6800 GT and a PIV 2.8. Most graphic-card options were at maximum, and all options were on except for soft shadows and AA. The game was playable with the former option on and the latter at 2X, although it did lead to frequent, brief hitches when I would enter new areas. Overall, I didn’t find this to be the system-killer than some people were anticipating.