For a shooter with some very clear action oriented decisions FEAR is quite calm paced. The encounters tend to be short and spaced between minutes of just moving around the place. In this exploration segments it could be guessed that the focus is on the scary part of the title and, while it partially is, it’s not as much in the horror stuff (that works better when it's goofy than when it’s trying to be serious in any sense, especially with the overall bad taste of the narrative) but more of creating an ambience.
I have the feeling that for quite some years shooters are generally conceived as fast paced action games. And while it’s not a bad approach at all, there is some underestimation in what some FPS have done since the very beginning. It’s demonstrative that the Doom reboots seek for “an action packed game as you remember from the original, but that never was” ignoring that the first Doom always had a very different approach to action. I think it’s not casualty that FPS games focused so much on the ambience, a custom that is still present in First Person Walkers. It’s not so weird thinking that they were one of the first genres to get 3D right, and in first person moreover, before anyone cared about the word “immersive”. If the first Doom already played with the lightning, setted up traps and overall played with tension and horror as part of the action, a FPS called FEAR is nothing but a logical conclusion.
As I said in the beginning, there is a lot in between the shootings. Your Point Man is not that powerful. Sure, super reflexes and kicks in the air, but he has to squeeze through the ventilation shafts, prefers to see the shadows of his enemies before taking his first shot, he even takes fall damage quite easily… Thanks to this methodical approach to action it’s easy to sink in the office building, a monotonous place in normal circumstances but inexplicably unsettling when abandoned, and its “elegiac auras”. This tension alone helps to build the actual fights as sort of a climax, but they are even better when some surprises come in. There is this one where you have to meet some of your partners in an elevator, so you go there, and ding, of course in one of the elevators there is one of the bad guys. But then ding ding ding ding and while you are still thinking how to get away from that, one of the heavy armored guys comes in. Even though I would like for the number of this kind of surprises to be higher, I cannot deny that I wish I would be this interested in the in-between segments in many more action titles. Maybe we are missing something in conceiving the action only with haste.
I have the feeling that for quite some years shooters are generally conceived as fast paced action games. And while it’s not a bad approach at all, there is some underestimation in what some FPS have done since the very beginning. It’s demonstrative that the Doom reboots seek for “an action packed game as you remember from the original, but that never was” ignoring that the first Doom always had a very different approach to action. I think it’s not casualty that FPS games focused so much on the ambience, a custom that is still present in First Person Walkers. It’s not so weird thinking that they were one of the first genres to get 3D right, and in first person moreover, before anyone cared about the word “immersive”. If the first Doom already played with the lightning, setted up traps and overall played with tension and horror as part of the action, a FPS called FEAR is nothing but a logical conclusion.
As I said in the beginning, there is a lot in between the shootings. Your Point Man is not that powerful. Sure, super reflexes and kicks in the air, but he has to squeeze through the ventilation shafts, prefers to see the shadows of his enemies before taking his first shot, he even takes fall damage quite easily… Thanks to this methodical approach to action it’s easy to sink in the office building, a monotonous place in normal circumstances but inexplicably unsettling when abandoned, and its “elegiac auras”. This tension alone helps to build the actual fights as sort of a climax, but they are even better when some surprises come in. There is this one where you have to meet some of your partners in an elevator, so you go there, and ding, of course in one of the elevators there is one of the bad guys. But then ding ding ding ding and while you are still thinking how to get away from that, one of the heavy armored guys comes in. Even though I would like for the number of this kind of surprises to be higher, I cannot deny that I wish I would be this interested in the in-between segments in many more action titles. Maybe we are missing something in conceiving the action only with haste.