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F.E.A.R. 2 (demo)
Much like last year, 2009 is already lining itself up as the year of sequels. It seems that creative and original thinking are being laid to rest with a gun to the forehead as a majority of “new” releases seem to be affixed with a number: Killzone 2, Resident Evil 5, Skate 2, Dawn of War 2, Bioshock 2…need I go on? F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is obviously no exception to the rule. As a casual fan of the first game I can’t say that I had been waiting with baited breath for the sequel (I only actually heard about it two days ago) but I did enjoy the blend of first-person shoot-em-up and survival horror and decided it was worth the 700MB space on my Xbox hard drive. The title F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin already suggests something of a prequel which, according to some sources (thank you Wikipedia), is true. Set thirty minutes before the end of the previous game, you play Mr. Lardy-Dar-Tough-Guy-Shooty-Man, a Delta Force operator, who must infiltrate the facility to arrest a blah blah blah yawn drone. Something about this already screams banality. Alarm bells are ringing for me. The story of the first one was never really a compelling element as more of a weak excuse to give the protagonist reason to keep going. So I don’t have high expectations for this one either. Okay, the creepy girl Alma is still making appearances but as we have gathered from films such as The Ring and The Grudge, children are very very scary. We get it. The demo begins with a nice slow-motion dream sequence in which Alma appears and disappears before you and ‘fucked up shit’ (as Oscar Wilde may say) keeps happening. These sequences were probably one of the best aspects of F.E.A.R. so it’s nice to see them making a comeback.
It’s not long before marines turn up to make you turn into a dead person and so much needed violence ensues just when you’re enjoying being chased by wispy apparitions and having inanimate objects hurled at you. This was one thing that seemed to bother me about the first game. It wasn’t more a melding of two genres (survival horror and shoot-em-up) as it was trying to be two different games. The eerie paranormal parts didn’t coincide with the action sequences and so there was a stop-start feel to the whole game play: you walk down a corridor and you see a ghost, you walk into a room and you fight marines. Repeat ad nauseam. F.E.A.R. 2 seems to have done the same here, though it may be too early to tell at this stage. Not only that but they also appear to be trying to add another sub-genre to the chaos that’s going on: that of fighting robots in which the protagonist is encouraged to climb into a large mechanism that fell off the set of Aliens and then fight other like-minded large mechanisms. Battling marines, paranormal happenings, giant robots…I don’t know, maybe the developers just crammed a lot in for the demo, but to me this just seems like too much. The horror elements of the game work. The shoot-em-up elements work. The twain didn’t really work as a one piece unit. So why the introduction of this third element? One thing at a time lads. In general it seems as though F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is going to impress those that really enjoyed the previous game. All the things that made the game good have been given a nice glossy do-over. Graphically it’s quite crisp and sheeny (what isn’t these days) and although I’m expecting predictable elements from the horror side of things, the demo still managed to make me jump a number of times. However, I don’t see much in the way of an actual sequel unless one deeply follows the plot. |
