Reviews from

in the past


Perceus MAN-date??? heh no thanks, i prefer women.

This second expansion goes surprisingly hard to the point where i think some parts of it surpass the original game

(note: i could just think this because i played it immediately after playing extraction point which was fucking terrible)

save me ..... steve blum
steve blum .......save me please

:/

If Extraction Point's like going for seconds after a meal, this is the leftovers after a few days. It's fine, it's more F.E.A.R. but the main part I didn't like in Extraction Point was the construction site since it focused on these more open areas that didn't work as well with F.E.A.R.'s combat and this feels like it leans into that. A ton of the arenas are these big open areas with a couple enemies who you just kind of pick off from the other side of the room, it doesn't play into the cinematic sandbox or tacticity of the game's combat and so just feels kind of weak.

I'd usually rate something like this as a 3 star since it is more F.E.A.R. and more F.E.A.R. is good but since Extraction Point was already doing that I don't really need more and would've preferred if they tried something slightly different. I thought it was maybe going for a more Soldier-y Call Of Duty tone with the open exterior areas and your wee squad which would at least be interesting to see but it very quickly goes back to the labs and offices of the base game, just open and big and not as good.

There was one fight which was just lit by red flares. That was cool.

While still a pretty good game, Perseus mandate is kind of a mess: it's what happens when F.E.A.R. meets Call of Duty and doubles every enemy's health pool. The amount of medkits scattered around the world is absolutely comical, and emblematic of the focus on action that this expansion went for.

Some areas look absolutely horrible while others look great. Why? Because the good looking ones are just recycled from the far superior Extraction point, and played in reverse.

The new elite commando enemies are just plain irritating: invariably met in pairs or more, and entirely too often, they constantly hop around, throw explosives and wall turrets at you, hit for half your health and, most of all, soak up more damage than a heavy armor. They are encounters designed solely around the use of slow-mo, which is pretty much how you're supposed to play the entirety of Perseus Mandate anyway: the minute shooting starts, hit the easy mode button and reap the spoils. If not, prepare for a tough, tough slog.

It's not a horrid campaign, only lazy and kind of missing the point of what makes F.E.A.R. great.

It doesn't reach the same level as the og game and the extraction point expansion, but it's cool if you want a more extensive playthrough and badass shooting, is FEAR, c'mon you need to feel it!


It's a good game, but it's a bit annoying that it's so stale. There were moments that creeped me out. In some long corridors, you can more or less predict what will happen.

Here you go on a mission as a second F.E.A.R team and you actually grasp some things according to the first group. It just didn't need to have such long levels. They dragged it out too much and this inevitably slowed down the pace. Still, I'm sure it will stay in my mind with some of the scenes.

I don't know what the hate is about? This expansion was decently fun and was honestly on par with Extraction. Maybe the story stuff going on in Extraction was more interesting but I liked the map design and pacing in this one.

Significantly better than the more middling expansion that preceded it. Although the story isn’t that engaging or interesting, it puts new gameplay, enemies, weapons, and locales first. The collection of new weapons are all pretty awesome even though the balancing on a couple of them is exceedingly nuts. Even though it does drag here and there, every single gunfight is a delight, in classic F.E.A.R. fashion.

more F.E.A.R. but with new touches here and there. more enemy types, more guns, some new characters and etc. which are thankfully balanced. this expansion pack also has the most paranormal fight scenes compared to the original game and Extraction Point.

1st fear done, on to the 2nd!

i couldnt finish this because it kept crashing

Eu gostei, o terror que eu buscava ja encontrei um pouco mais aqui e continua sendo um fps bem legal.

If I could use one word to describe Perseus Mandate, it would be "chore". The story is just kind of pointless, the pacing is stilted, the characters are mostly unlikable (Chen was the only one that got beyond indifference from me), the relatively subtle and eerie horror from previous entries is replaced with cheap jump scares, creatures/enemies that were scary and/or difficult now appear so frequently that they lose all novelty. Then, there's the combat. One of the series' strengths thus far is also just overplayed in this expansion. There's more fights than Extraction Point, with each fight having many more enemies, and the fights themselves seeming almost constant to the point where I was wishing for a dull moment just to break the tedium. The new weapons are mostly lackluster, the new enemies are just old ones but stronger (meaning bullet sponges and unreasonably fast), combat was already exhausting by Interval 3 (less than halfway through the expansion), not because of difficulty, but simply because of the frequency. By Interval 5 I had fully stopped caring what was going on and just kind of waltzed through what was left with no real regard just to simply wrap it up. While it has a few good moments, Perseus Mandate is mostly an underwhelming follow-up to FEAR and Extraction Point and kind of hard to recommend unless beating your head against a wall for 5 hours sounds appealing. The final stretch of the game is an absolute joke, it's a meatgrinder just for the sake of being one and individually breaking each of your own fingers with a hammer may unironically be a more fun experience.

I'm not quite sure what happened during development, but the magic that made FEAR enjoyable was lost somewhere along the way.

The gameplay is still fun, it's more FEAR goodness. The new weapons and enemies are cool. That said, the story is...nothing, and the game goes on for too long. Play if you are desperate for more FEAR, and why wouldn't you be?

never finished perseus mandate before, so i thought it was about time to do so. PM is the lowest the first F.E.A.R. can get, full of depressingly bland lighting, boring skirmishes, and weak additions. LithTech lighting is some of the greatest to be found in a game from its time and even today. Pitch-black silhouettes of enemies and deep voids accent the surfaces of F.E.A.R. to create an impeccable atmosphere. fighting in the shadows, exploring vents in a vacuum, and witnessing horrors in the dark, the stark lighting is great in the base game. timegate studios, for some reason, thought that the game should just have global illumination turned to 11, making nighttime outdoors combat incredibly drab. no muzzle flashes to light up dark corners or flashlights to cut through shadows, just plain ol', evenly lit arenas for 90% of the game. the arenas dont make it any better. many of them are boring single-floor, open rooms with boxes as the only cover. gone are the anxiously close-quarters gunfights of the original F.E.A.R. as most encounters are quick skirmishes across large rooms and halls. the verticality of the original made it even tenser when fighting enemies as they could flank from above or take a long winding path for a surprise attack. enemies in PM can barely surprise you. the new enemies arent even that interesting. the mercs are the same thing as the clone soldiers, so they're basically clones of clones. the quick ninja mercs are too tanky and quick to be entertaining fights, made worse by their usually terrible arenas. the new monster enemies are neat, made better by the area they're introduced in. that's probably the highlight of the expansion, the underground area where the invisible beasts kill your buddy chen. timegate remembered about the great lighting and puts it to great use while also putting f.e.a.r. in a new locale. it's a nerve-wracking level where you tiptoe and obsess over your flashlight battery. but good things always end and you get thrust back into the grinder of boring to decent fights. the new weapons arent even that exciting with a 'new' assault rifle (it has a scope?!?! woah..), a weaker railgun equivalent, a kinda sick grenade launcher, and a neat laser beam rifle. the placeable turret isnt really worth mentioning. Its only value is that it can distract enemies. the highs reached f.e.a.r.'s baseline, with great horror visuals and atmosphere on occasion. however, the lows were so low and more common, just dragging the expansion into a pitiful crater. it does scratch the f.e.a.r. gameplay loop at times, but it's not wholly worth getting into unless you're a big f.e.a.r.-head, which is the only reason i even decided to play it after hearing it was disappointing. a middle-of-the-road expansion, so replay f.e.a.r.

Stinks like shit until a scant few sections during the last hour of its runtime.

It's even more FEAR except this time it's super boring because the combat feels slow with how spongy the new enemies are, the lighting is gone making the game look like shit, and the story and horror is somehow even worse then it already was. If it says anything on how boring it was I've also completed Postal 3 and the Sega CD version of The Lawnmower Man game without even thinking about maybe abandoning them. Not outright awful but maybe it should of been so it was at least interesting in any way shape or form, would not recommend.

I went into F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate with low expectations. I liked the original, but Extraction Point felt really, really lacking.

Well, good news! I'm apathetic to this game's existence!

Tongue-and-cheek compliment aside, Perseus Mandate feels like a better expansion. The story is still shallow, but having a new cast of characters feels fresh. The new enemy types are less boring than the first expansion's, and most of the expansion is combat focused, with some fun arenas. It's a lot of hallways and courtyards, yes, but it's nowhere near as boring as Expansion Point's subway hell.

That being said, it's still not good. It's just not bad either. The highs were low, and the lows were high. It's the perfect game to half-focus on while you're talking to a friend, but not something I'd waste my time replaying.

It's nothing, but that's better than being bad. If you have three hours to kill, and you're a completionist like me, then sure, give Perseus Mandate a go. But I promise you you won't be missing anything if you go from this straight to F.E.A.R. 2 (Though I wouldn't recommend that one either).

Absolute ass expansion. You are on crack if you think this is better than F.E.A.R. Extraction Point LMAO

This review contains spoilers

Spoilers only discussed at the very bottom

Perseus Mandate is the second and final story expansion for the original FEAR, focusing on a different set of characters and their actions during the last act of the original game (my review here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/428982/). As a result of this, spoilers will be discussed about that release, so you have been warned.

Because the same engine was reused, and because there are only so many ways to reiterate the same thing in a new tone, I’m not going to go into detail about the technical aspects of Perseus- the link above provides an introspective look into those facets should you be interested. In terms of any distinct graphical variances, I honestly thought that Perseus appeared slightly worse with regards to NPC models - the faces came off as more clay-ey than the solid countenances of the vanilla FEAR, possibly due to the mocap process being more rushed this time around. The game also overindulges in the blood-soaked room trope- it was already old by the end of the first FEAR, but here it can’t help but come off as edgy art design. Other than those two things, though, Perseus Mandate is darkly resplendent, and unlike Extraction Point, runs without any bugs (slippery dirt grounds being the exception).

In the sound department, I thought ambient noise was handled better- environments come across a lot more sonorous than before. Nothing spellbinding, but cool nonetheless.

Gameplay-wise, again, controls are handled similarly. In addition to all the fresh gear from Extraction Point, you have two new guns: a more powerful assault rifle with tracer rounds and a lighting laser that’s essentially a rehash of the particle beam from the OG. So not much in the way of creativity, though they are fun to use.

Really, where Perseus visibly shakes things up is in its newly-conceived enemy types. You got a different merc group armed with higher-caliber weaponry; giant soldiers wielding equally giant shields; demented beings who abruptly sprout out of pools of shadow ala the Wallmasters from Ocarina of Time; and, most intriguing, goggle-wearing supersoldiers dubbed Nightcrawlers who are not only partly immune to reflex time, but capable of crawling and leaping everywhere like spiders. While Nightcrawlers are more akin to minibosses, they make for some tense fights whenever you encounter them.

Besides bringing back previous archetypes from Extraction Point, Perseus further continues the trend of shifting the series in a pure action direction. There are no drawn-out horror intervals, just occasional moments of fright that quickly dissipate to leave room for more fighting. I personally had no problem with this since neither of the prequels were particularly scary, although ardent fans will certainly find flaws here.

Perseus also feels like it employs open areas at a greater frequency than was done before, which made it a little funner to play since closed-in environs are inherently more straining on the eyes than wider ones. That being said, while I did claim in my critique of FEAR that the enemy AI would have benefitted from being able to function in broader places, maybe I spoke too soon as the antagonists came off as dumber here. With the exception of the Nightcrawlers, everyone else tends to just stand-in-place and trade suppressing fire with you until you get the better of them. I don’t know if this was an issue on TimeGate’s coding or me being ignorant in my recollection of FEAR and Extraction Point, but I’ll leave it here for the sake of a record.

A decent amount of missions give you your own allied partners, and unlike the mercs, the programming for them is actually pretty good- they won’t be chucking grenades or anything complicated, but they will actually kill opposing forces.

Now, it’s the story that gamers will be most interested in as that is the real differentiator for Perseus. Well, you’ll be happy to know that I ended up liking Mandate’s narrative about as much as the vanilla FEAR, largely because it essentially copy/pastes it! As noted in the introduction, Perseus is a sidequel centered on a second FEAR team who are deployed to another Armachan building to obtain data on some project called, you guessed it, Perseus. And it’s nearly a beat-for-beat retread of the OG Fear, with your three-man team getting separated at points, you uncovering Armachan’s secrets about Alma, an even an endgame set in the vault.

There are narrative issues at play here. For one, the Perseus Project isn’t as fleshed out as Project Origin was, and it didn’t make sense to me why the two Recon Teams weren’t sharing information with each other as they uncovered related data. Secondly, while materializing less than before, Alma still continues to be a frustrating plot device, and the post-credits doesn’t line-up with immediate prior events.+ I also heavily disliked TimeGate reemploying the silent protagonist trope- your unnamed “Sergeant” has no business being anonymous or quiet when his teammates don’t have either trait. Combined with him possessing reflex vision and experiencing intimate hallucinations, he is, for all intents and purposes, The-Point-Man-in-Everything-but-Name, rendering him an extremely lazy ripoff.

Despite these downsides, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t kind of thrilling tracking down and opening another one of Armachan’s skeleton-filled closets whilst simultaneously dealing with supernatural machinations. For all the negative sentiment Perseus Mandate gets, I definitely enjoyed it more than Extraction Point and would recommend it, flaws and all, to those who appreciated the story of the first FEAR. At the very least, in contrast to its predecessors, it has a pretty satisfactory conclusion.

Notes
-After completion, Perseus includes three bonus missions that are pure shooters involving you running around clearing waves of gunners as you try to progress to the end of a level. I personally didn’t finish them after dying during the first, but more content for you if you like the gameplay.

-I’m surprised to hear popular complaints about the length -- to me, Perseus kind of overstayed its welcome, but even if it hadn’t it took me 30+ minutes more to beat than Extraction Point.

-Steven Blum voices one of your teammates! I don’t know if I can say his voice fit the Army Captain role, but it was sweet recognizing him.

-This is the first time I’ve seen explicit product placement in a video game, with DELL and Alienware Computers being used by Armachan personnel (though I guess it’s all Dell since Alien is a subsidiary).
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+Like a sensation of déjà vu, Alma is back and inconsistent in her magnitude. She’s clearly against the soldiers of fortune trying to acquire Fettel’s DNA, as exhibited by her murdering some of them, yet that’s just it….why is she allowing so many of them to continue forward on their mission whilst vaporizing a select few? No explanation is given whatsoever.


++The post-credits shows a corrupt US Senator being handed Fettel’s DNA ala the ending of Dead Man’s Chest with Norrington giving Beckett Davy Jones’s Heart. My question is how? You blatantly kill the head assassin holding it and take it back to FEAR HQ, so where did this rando get it from? At least show some switch happening between henchmen if you’re going to pull a fast one.

La segunda expansión para el FEAR original no es nada más que unas cuantas horas de acción y disparos sin absolutamente nada novedoso que añadir. Sí, se explora una faceta adicional de la historia que ya se conoce, pero la verdad no hay necesidad de añadir más capítulos a una trama que ya no tiene nada nuevo que ofrecer. Hay espacio para la creación de nuevas mecánicas, pero eso no sucede en ninguna parte y al final lo que se obtiene es un FPS que debería ser de terror, pero termina siendo muy básico y simple.

Decent expansion, just more of that F.E.A.R. gameplay which automatically makes it great.

Two outta three ain't bad, but that doesn't mean it didn't suck.


While I enjoyed Extraction point more I found that Perseus Mandate was still a very solid expansion. I think what I hated the most about the expansion was finishing it because now I have no more fear 1 to play. Like Extraction if you have Fear 1 on PC or fear files you have access to this DLC so of course play it its a good and creepy time !

Mas divertida que la anterior expansión y menos rota. Mas enemigos, nuevas armas y unos nuevos protagonistas. Nada mal.

This one really tries to bring more content, while comparing to the others it has even more variety of weapons, enemies and actual boss fight but also is surprisingly harder (?).
Enemies suddenly deal much more damage which makes the game not a cakewalk anymore and forces you to play smarter.
The plot is as bad as in the first DLC.