This review contains spoilers
Spoilers for FEAR 2 only discussed at the very bottom. Explicit spoilers for the first FEAR discussed throughout
FEAR 2 may be the most conflicted game I’ve ever played, and I’m not talking about my feelings. Like its numerical title, it genuinely feels like a tale of two devs; one who wanted to remake Half-Life 1 versus one who wanted to follow-up on the original FEAR, the result being a smorgasbord of unsatisfying elements wrapped up in a well-optimized package. It’s not bad by any means, however, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better case study in divisive visions, the story being the prime offender.
See, FEAR 2 acts as a sidepiece to the original game, taking place before, during, and after the nuclear event. And yet, what you’ll quickly realize is just how rehashed everything is: you’ve got a spec ops team sent in to stop an Armachan stooge, the discovery of some sickening corpo experiments, and a quiet protagonist boasting a secret connection to Alma. While such “requels” aren’t inherently bad (DKC2 is one of the GOAT video games after all), it’s the lackadaisicality here that hampers FEAR 2’s storytelling as rarely have I played a game that wanted to tell a tale yet simultaneously felt annoyed at having to do so. There was clearly someone at Monolith who had a grand framework in mind for what the game should be (to the point of retconning Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate+), only for their idea to get stuffed away for reasons unknown (this negative duality going back to what I was saying earlier about clashing goals).
If I had to hazard a guess, it was probably because of budgetary concerns - I’m not saying FEAR 1 was perfect, however its dedication to cutscenes and voiced exposition clearly indicated a veritable interest in narrative conveyance. Here, when you’re not being serenaded by the same boring dusty illusion of Alma, you’re treated to forgettable dialogue amidst oodles upon oodles of optional data that should NOT have been optional. I’ve never had an issue with supplementary material expanding upon a game’s mythology, but FEAR 2 takes laziness to new heights by throwing 90% of its explanations and answers into randomized computer files you have to go out of your way to find.
And it’s a shame because, if the info in those PDFs had been orated organically, we could’ve had a riveting sci-fi thriller at our fingertips; you get some genuinely disturbing revelations from a writing team that clearly knew the world they were operating in. Alas, as it stands, you’ll be spending the majority of your time following orders like a good little sycophant, a facet made all the more aggravating by Monolith going the silent hero route again. Mute leads are fine in tales where their personality has no bearing on the story; however, that is NOT the case here with main character Beckett, who serves as the impetus for most of Project Origin’s events courtesy of his unusual link to Alma(++). It becomes genuinely frustrating seeing him placed in situations that would warrant a human reaction, only for his silence to undermine the going-ons about you.
If that wasn’t bad enough, FEAR 2 is continuously plagued by the same two plot holes that ravaged its prequels, and no spoiler tags are necessary because these are literally copy/pasted verbatim. For starters, why are there two Almas? Even if I buy the logic that one represents the day her spirit died vs her body, the former should still be that of a teenager, not the 8-year-old girl you catch intermittently. Secondly, and without a doubt the most vexing, how is she simultaneously all-powerful and all-useless? Seriously, throughout the game she’s capable of vaporizing, brainwashing, and tossing humans about like ragdolls (in addition to, you know, generating hordes of the undead), yet you mean to tell me this same demon can somehow be shaken off? I get that omnipotent villains are hard to write, but the way Alma is scripted, it’s as though the developers didn’t even try to be cogent.
To the game’s credit, a couple mysteries from the first FEAR are cleared up here (such as Alma’s backstory and why certain characters have superhuman reflexes), but when it’s all done through discretionary notes, what you’re ultimately left with is a redux of Half-Life. No really, between the stripped-down narrative and pure obedience, it’s evident Project Origin was trying to go the Half-Life route of environmental storytelling over cinematic exposés, and while they are partially-successful (the school being a masterpiece of game design), even this initiative is brought down by the aforementioned budget cuts. Whereas Half-Life took you through a variety of locales ranging from labs to deserts to of course Xen, Project Origin sees you inside a plethora of drabby interiors indifferent from the numerous corridors you’ve witnessed time-and-time-again in other video games. Here’s a fact for you casuals -- when a game throws you into a subway station for an elongated period of time, it’s a sign that the studio was working with limited capital.
Thankfully, it all looks great courtesy of the LithTech Engine, which has seen a massive facelift from the first FEAR. Not only is the texture streaming superb, but the artisans at Monolith took the time to sculpt tiny little details into the majority of simulacra. During the course of my playthrough, for example, I came across the following minutiae: paintings with full-fledged descriptions etched under their frames, magazines with decked-out covers, towel racks with allocated labels, individual student signatures, guitar cases with specialized stickers, and children’s drawings constituting a variety of forms (like dinosaurs and cities) amongst a plethora of others. The amount of effort that went into crafting this setting is phenomenal, and the unsung artists behind such endeavors deserve all their flowers.
That said, be prepared to have your flashlight out 23/7 as this is an overly-dim game. Yes, it’s set in dingy buildings primarily at night, but that was no excuse for things to be this obscure as, even with the brightness turned up, I literally had to leave my torch on just to make out the ground in front of me (I also recommend turning off the film grain and head bobbing lest you procure a case of motion sickness).
When it comes to the gameplay, everyone knows the OG garnered fame for combining Max Payne’s bullet-time mechanic with slick shooting, and that formula’s been largely-translated to the sequel albeit with dumber AI. Those who read my review of FEAR 1 know that I wasn’t the biggest cheerleader of its enemy intelligence, but those guys were definitely a step above the swarms of thugs you’ll encounter here, who display no sense of tactic other than to trade suppressing fire and lob the occasional grenade. Hampering things further is the easier difficulty - in 1, your slowdown was countered by heavier bullet damage; in Project Origin, Beckett is much more durable, allowing you to abuse the system to a greater extent.
Finally, you’ve no doubt heard about the game’s lack of particle anarchy, and that’s definitely true. For better and for worse, this is a much more conventional FPS, and while you still get the odd extravagant effect like pill bottles popping and water surfaces ricocheting, I can’t deny something was lost with the diminishment of the original’s collateral damage (most items shot simply sprouting a bullet hole over exploding).
Sound isn’t the best either, with weapons, in particular, lacking the punch their previous incarnations had. Combine that with indistinguishable collision blasts and repetitive ghost wailing for the supernatural elements and you have a rather tepid soundscape. Still, I’ll take it over the score, which is obnoxious to a fault. When I was playing the game, I remember thinking how intrusive and cacophonous the music sounded, and unfortunately listening to it separately didn’t alleviate this memory as the vast majority of pieces are simply loud melodies. There technically is diversity, with my ear detecting electronica, native vocals, and even a zurna-esque instrument, but all of these additions are directed towards pure bombast instead of something memorable.
What’s particularly bizarre about FEAR 2’s score is the sheer number of tracks it has. The YouTube playlist identifies 80, and while that does include alternatives that didn't make it into the final release, it’s still a significant amount for a game under 8 hours. Heck, I’ve played numerous AAA games with significantly less music, and though it’s not a bad thing to include more tunes, the quality just wasn't there to justify their integration (not to mention I doubt most gamers will hear the lion’s share of them).
With regards to the voice acting, all I’ll say is it’s adequate. No one is especially strong, yet none detract from the experience either. And that’s a great way to describe FEAR 2 as a whole: a fine enough diversion. If you’re looking for an action game that’ll kill 7-8 hours of your time, you can’t go wrong here as the gunplay’s solid, visuals beautiful, and storybeats easy to follow. It’s just a shame the end product doesn’t live up to the potential someone at Monolith clearly hoped it would be, with the narrative being lackluster, Alma pathetic, and the horror elements poorly implemented. The palpable lethargy on display genuinely makes you wonder what happened between 1 and 2’s releases.
NOTES
-One cool sound effect is shooting pianos generates flat keyboard notes.
-For the record, not all the tracks are loud, but even the quieter ones like Return to Lobby and Principal’s Office have a noticeable thumping.
-Just like with the first game, FEAR 2 has its own out-of-place white nerd; Snakefist. Thankfully, he’s nowhere near as annoying as Mapes was.
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SPOILERS
+I naturally find such retcons to be pathetic in general, but what’s strange is it wasn't even necessary. Perseus Mandate focuses on a completely different thread, while the Point Man’s absence in FEAR 2 makes Extraction Point’s events unintrusive. Unless the argument is Alma can’t be in two places at once, I don’t see why Monolith chose to remove the DLCs from continuity.
++Beckett has a high stat called “telesthetic potential,” that makes him attractive to Alma to the point of her wanting to mate with him. It’s a juvenile set-up that isn’t properly explained (or if it was, was done so in the background) -- why does Alma randomly want to procreate when she already has two children out in the world (and can revive phantoms)? Why is it so easy for Beckett to resist her? If Alma is so desperate to copulate with Beckett, why does she let him waltz into dangerous situations instead of dispersing all enemies? How does she even succeed at the end when he manages to activate the machine (and, you know, blatantly doesn’t do the act….do the writers not know how sex works?). I also found it more than a bit creepy to have contrasting images of a naked adult Alma with her younger child version.
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FEAR 2 may be the most conflicted game I’ve ever played, and I’m not talking about my feelings. Like its numerical title, it genuinely feels like a tale of two devs; one who wanted to remake Half-Life 1 versus one who wanted to follow-up on the original FEAR, the result being a smorgasbord of unsatisfying elements wrapped up in a well-optimized package. It’s not bad by any means, however, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better case study in divisive visions, the story being the prime offender.
See, FEAR 2 acts as a sidepiece to the original game, taking place before, during, and after the nuclear event. And yet, what you’ll quickly realize is just how rehashed everything is: you’ve got a spec ops team sent in to stop an Armachan stooge, the discovery of some sickening corpo experiments, and a quiet protagonist boasting a secret connection to Alma. While such “requels” aren’t inherently bad (DKC2 is one of the GOAT video games after all), it’s the lackadaisicality here that hampers FEAR 2’s storytelling as rarely have I played a game that wanted to tell a tale yet simultaneously felt annoyed at having to do so. There was clearly someone at Monolith who had a grand framework in mind for what the game should be (to the point of retconning Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate+), only for their idea to get stuffed away for reasons unknown (this negative duality going back to what I was saying earlier about clashing goals).
If I had to hazard a guess, it was probably because of budgetary concerns - I’m not saying FEAR 1 was perfect, however its dedication to cutscenes and voiced exposition clearly indicated a veritable interest in narrative conveyance. Here, when you’re not being serenaded by the same boring dusty illusion of Alma, you’re treated to forgettable dialogue amidst oodles upon oodles of optional data that should NOT have been optional. I’ve never had an issue with supplementary material expanding upon a game’s mythology, but FEAR 2 takes laziness to new heights by throwing 90% of its explanations and answers into randomized computer files you have to go out of your way to find.
And it’s a shame because, if the info in those PDFs had been orated organically, we could’ve had a riveting sci-fi thriller at our fingertips; you get some genuinely disturbing revelations from a writing team that clearly knew the world they were operating in. Alas, as it stands, you’ll be spending the majority of your time following orders like a good little sycophant, a facet made all the more aggravating by Monolith going the silent hero route again. Mute leads are fine in tales where their personality has no bearing on the story; however, that is NOT the case here with main character Beckett, who serves as the impetus for most of Project Origin’s events courtesy of his unusual link to Alma(++). It becomes genuinely frustrating seeing him placed in situations that would warrant a human reaction, only for his silence to undermine the going-ons about you.
If that wasn’t bad enough, FEAR 2 is continuously plagued by the same two plot holes that ravaged its prequels, and no spoiler tags are necessary because these are literally copy/pasted verbatim. For starters, why are there two Almas? Even if I buy the logic that one represents the day her spirit died vs her body, the former should still be that of a teenager, not the 8-year-old girl you catch intermittently. Secondly, and without a doubt the most vexing, how is she simultaneously all-powerful and all-useless? Seriously, throughout the game she’s capable of vaporizing, brainwashing, and tossing humans about like ragdolls (in addition to, you know, generating hordes of the undead), yet you mean to tell me this same demon can somehow be shaken off? I get that omnipotent villains are hard to write, but the way Alma is scripted, it’s as though the developers didn’t even try to be cogent.
To the game’s credit, a couple mysteries from the first FEAR are cleared up here (such as Alma’s backstory and why certain characters have superhuman reflexes), but when it’s all done through discretionary notes, what you’re ultimately left with is a redux of Half-Life. No really, between the stripped-down narrative and pure obedience, it’s evident Project Origin was trying to go the Half-Life route of environmental storytelling over cinematic exposés, and while they are partially-successful (the school being a masterpiece of game design), even this initiative is brought down by the aforementioned budget cuts. Whereas Half-Life took you through a variety of locales ranging from labs to deserts to of course Xen, Project Origin sees you inside a plethora of drabby interiors indifferent from the numerous corridors you’ve witnessed time-and-time-again in other video games. Here’s a fact for you casuals -- when a game throws you into a subway station for an elongated period of time, it’s a sign that the studio was working with limited capital.
Thankfully, it all looks great courtesy of the LithTech Engine, which has seen a massive facelift from the first FEAR. Not only is the texture streaming superb, but the artisans at Monolith took the time to sculpt tiny little details into the majority of simulacra. During the course of my playthrough, for example, I came across the following minutiae: paintings with full-fledged descriptions etched under their frames, magazines with decked-out covers, towel racks with allocated labels, individual student signatures, guitar cases with specialized stickers, and children’s drawings constituting a variety of forms (like dinosaurs and cities) amongst a plethora of others. The amount of effort that went into crafting this setting is phenomenal, and the unsung artists behind such endeavors deserve all their flowers.
That said, be prepared to have your flashlight out 23/7 as this is an overly-dim game. Yes, it’s set in dingy buildings primarily at night, but that was no excuse for things to be this obscure as, even with the brightness turned up, I literally had to leave my torch on just to make out the ground in front of me (I also recommend turning off the film grain and head bobbing lest you procure a case of motion sickness).
When it comes to the gameplay, everyone knows the OG garnered fame for combining Max Payne’s bullet-time mechanic with slick shooting, and that formula’s been largely-translated to the sequel albeit with dumber AI. Those who read my review of FEAR 1 know that I wasn’t the biggest cheerleader of its enemy intelligence, but those guys were definitely a step above the swarms of thugs you’ll encounter here, who display no sense of tactic other than to trade suppressing fire and lob the occasional grenade. Hampering things further is the easier difficulty - in 1, your slowdown was countered by heavier bullet damage; in Project Origin, Beckett is much more durable, allowing you to abuse the system to a greater extent.
Finally, you’ve no doubt heard about the game’s lack of particle anarchy, and that’s definitely true. For better and for worse, this is a much more conventional FPS, and while you still get the odd extravagant effect like pill bottles popping and water surfaces ricocheting, I can’t deny something was lost with the diminishment of the original’s collateral damage (most items shot simply sprouting a bullet hole over exploding).
Sound isn’t the best either, with weapons, in particular, lacking the punch their previous incarnations had. Combine that with indistinguishable collision blasts and repetitive ghost wailing for the supernatural elements and you have a rather tepid soundscape. Still, I’ll take it over the score, which is obnoxious to a fault. When I was playing the game, I remember thinking how intrusive and cacophonous the music sounded, and unfortunately listening to it separately didn’t alleviate this memory as the vast majority of pieces are simply loud melodies. There technically is diversity, with my ear detecting electronica, native vocals, and even a zurna-esque instrument, but all of these additions are directed towards pure bombast instead of something memorable.
What’s particularly bizarre about FEAR 2’s score is the sheer number of tracks it has. The YouTube playlist identifies 80, and while that does include alternatives that didn't make it into the final release, it’s still a significant amount for a game under 8 hours. Heck, I’ve played numerous AAA games with significantly less music, and though it’s not a bad thing to include more tunes, the quality just wasn't there to justify their integration (not to mention I doubt most gamers will hear the lion’s share of them).
With regards to the voice acting, all I’ll say is it’s adequate. No one is especially strong, yet none detract from the experience either. And that’s a great way to describe FEAR 2 as a whole: a fine enough diversion. If you’re looking for an action game that’ll kill 7-8 hours of your time, you can’t go wrong here as the gunplay’s solid, visuals beautiful, and storybeats easy to follow. It’s just a shame the end product doesn’t live up to the potential someone at Monolith clearly hoped it would be, with the narrative being lackluster, Alma pathetic, and the horror elements poorly implemented. The palpable lethargy on display genuinely makes you wonder what happened between 1 and 2’s releases.
NOTES
-One cool sound effect is shooting pianos generates flat keyboard notes.
-For the record, not all the tracks are loud, but even the quieter ones like Return to Lobby and Principal’s Office have a noticeable thumping.
-Just like with the first game, FEAR 2 has its own out-of-place white nerd; Snakefist. Thankfully, he’s nowhere near as annoying as Mapes was.
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SPOILERS
+I naturally find such retcons to be pathetic in general, but what’s strange is it wasn't even necessary. Perseus Mandate focuses on a completely different thread, while the Point Man’s absence in FEAR 2 makes Extraction Point’s events unintrusive. Unless the argument is Alma can’t be in two places at once, I don’t see why Monolith chose to remove the DLCs from continuity.
++Beckett has a high stat called “telesthetic potential,” that makes him attractive to Alma to the point of her wanting to mate with him. It’s a juvenile set-up that isn’t properly explained (or if it was, was done so in the background) -- why does Alma randomly want to procreate when she already has two children out in the world (and can revive phantoms)? Why is it so easy for Beckett to resist her? If Alma is so desperate to copulate with Beckett, why does she let him waltz into dangerous situations instead of dispersing all enemies? How does she even succeed at the end when he manages to activate the machine (and, you know, blatantly doesn’t do the act….do the writers not know how sex works?). I also found it more than a bit creepy to have contrasting images of a naked adult Alma with her younger child version.
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2 Comments
@Sondi that's a really good way of summing up the game and I'm glad you agree that the first FEAR itself wasn't as grand a masterpiece as its fans claim it was.
Yeah, I plan on playing 3 with a sibling due to the co-op aspect, so that outta be fun. I heard it's the worst, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun haha.
Yeah, I plan on playing 3 with a sibling due to the co-op aspect, so that outta be fun. I heard it's the worst, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun haha.
sondi
5 days ago