fucking godawful, lacks anything that made the original game stand out and shine, instead of well designed interiors most of the game takes place in boring, flat exterior levels with wide open areas
Narratively very weak I think the more sequels/spin offs this franchise got the more cursed the story became. Less is more and show don't tell were fears creed and from then on it's more whacky-ness with each entry. HOWEVER the gameplay is still amazing, but the narrative is more in your face bad, also the merc groups elites (shifters???) are broken that or I didn't understand them.
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!
"An Underwhelming Yet Serviceable Expansion"
The second and final expansion for F.E.A.R. had a lot of potential for both adding to the story of the franchise as well as expanding on the combat in a unique or thoughtful way. However, instead of trying something new, this expansion delivers next to no original content for the series up to this point, a few decent but boring weapons, and takes a huge step back in terms of quality of combat, horror, and graphical fidelity.
The first thing every player will notice right out of the gate is the awful texture work done for this game. Many buildings, streets, floors, and walls are extremely plain, looking completely out of place in a laughable way. While this doesn't directly affect the gameplay in any major way, it definitely made the experience much less interesting to go through, which is especially rough considering that the environments are one of the weakest aspects of the original game and its first expansion. A much better effort should have been put into making the game look nice, especially with this coming out two years after the base game's release.
The combat is also noticeably more bland in this entry. There are less areas where enemies can pull off interesting tactical maneuvers against the player, leading to very bland fights that rely on sticking your body in and out of cover repeatedly. The dynamic nature of the previous entries is mostly lost in a lot of the levels, which is a huge shame because it is what the first game shined at. The visual effects are still intact, making every firefight extremely theatrical, but the lack of quality textures leaves much to be desired.
The horror is also very poor in this title. There are a multitude of cheesy jumpscares that only a toddler would freak out at, with a VERY small handful being effective. The death scenes for some characters are also pretty bad, save for one during the final third of the game that was pretty interesting to witness. There are many extended horror sequences that are a part of the game now as well, which lead to extremely boring sections of the game that have irritating enemies to kill. The base game had a good balance of horror and action, but the action was always much better than the horror. This time around, the developers didn't get the memo.
The weapons are plentiful, but some players may grow tired of the arsenal. The new weapons added in this expansion are just "okay", but aren't nearly as effective as older weapons. Unfortunately, those weapons fell very boring to use after 15+ hours of F.E.A.R. content.
Other than this set of flaws, the nature of the game is still intact. The new enemies are pretty similar to the base game's, minus the cool voices those dudes had before. The entire experience is diluted this time though, so many players may not feel like finishing the experience due to a lack of meaningful content. The story is still pretty bad, and starts to take a turn for the worse once the convoluted "Origin" piece is added to the franchises' lore.
Overall, I can still Recommend this expansion if you're really craving some more F.E.A.R. , but you won't walk away very impressed with this one. There should have been more effort in not only maintaining the quality of the original's experience, but with adding interesting and compelling designs that would make this expansion fresh for fans. All that remains is an "alright" experience, one that some players may choose to forget.
Final Verdict: 6/10 (Above Average)
The second and final expansion for F.E.A.R. had a lot of potential for both adding to the story of the franchise as well as expanding on the combat in a unique or thoughtful way. However, instead of trying something new, this expansion delivers next to no original content for the series up to this point, a few decent but boring weapons, and takes a huge step back in terms of quality of combat, horror, and graphical fidelity.
The first thing every player will notice right out of the gate is the awful texture work done for this game. Many buildings, streets, floors, and walls are extremely plain, looking completely out of place in a laughable way. While this doesn't directly affect the gameplay in any major way, it definitely made the experience much less interesting to go through, which is especially rough considering that the environments are one of the weakest aspects of the original game and its first expansion. A much better effort should have been put into making the game look nice, especially with this coming out two years after the base game's release.
The combat is also noticeably more bland in this entry. There are less areas where enemies can pull off interesting tactical maneuvers against the player, leading to very bland fights that rely on sticking your body in and out of cover repeatedly. The dynamic nature of the previous entries is mostly lost in a lot of the levels, which is a huge shame because it is what the first game shined at. The visual effects are still intact, making every firefight extremely theatrical, but the lack of quality textures leaves much to be desired.
The horror is also very poor in this title. There are a multitude of cheesy jumpscares that only a toddler would freak out at, with a VERY small handful being effective. The death scenes for some characters are also pretty bad, save for one during the final third of the game that was pretty interesting to witness. There are many extended horror sequences that are a part of the game now as well, which lead to extremely boring sections of the game that have irritating enemies to kill. The base game had a good balance of horror and action, but the action was always much better than the horror. This time around, the developers didn't get the memo.
The weapons are plentiful, but some players may grow tired of the arsenal. The new weapons added in this expansion are just "okay", but aren't nearly as effective as older weapons. Unfortunately, those weapons fell very boring to use after 15+ hours of F.E.A.R. content.
Other than this set of flaws, the nature of the game is still intact. The new enemies are pretty similar to the base game's, minus the cool voices those dudes had before. The entire experience is diluted this time though, so many players may not feel like finishing the experience due to a lack of meaningful content. The story is still pretty bad, and starts to take a turn for the worse once the convoluted "Origin" piece is added to the franchises' lore.
Overall, I can still Recommend this expansion if you're really craving some more F.E.A.R. , but you won't walk away very impressed with this one. There should have been more effort in not only maintaining the quality of the original's experience, but with adding interesting and compelling designs that would make this expansion fresh for fans. All that remains is an "alright" experience, one that some players may choose to forget.
Final Verdict: 6/10 (Above Average)
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.
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.
You know it's a great game when I ran into a game-breaking bug that completely prevented me from finishing the game, and I was happy about it. Still marking it as finished because I gave it four more hours than it deserved.
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.
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.
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 !
i couldnt finish this because it kept crashing
Actually a pretty good expansion. It really improved on the base game. AI was better and boss battles were decent.