F.3.A.R.
Here be outright spoilers for F.3.A.R. The game is good enough being spoilered on it would actually be kind of bad, too.
Let's start with the negative: F.3.A.R. leans more on generic modern cover shooter design than on classic F.E.A.R. design, and so there's an argument you could go and play some other modern cover shooter for most of the same experience... at least, when playing the Point Man, but I'll come back to that later. Related to this point, F.3.A.R. streamlines the game experience by doing away with almost all resource management: there's no armor, no medkits, your health fully regenerates in a matter of seconds. All that's left is your two weapons and your Slow-Mo meter. This means a lot of depth and nuance from the original game is gone entirely.
Segueing into the positive, this means F.3.A.R. is properly embracing an entire coherent design philosophy. F.E.A.R. 2 was this awful game halfway between classic F.E.A.R and a modern cover shooter sort of experience, with the strengths of neither. F.3.A.R. is fundamentally competent in a way F.E.A.R. 2 was not, because it's building on well-established principles that work.
F.3.A.R. isn't so hot at delivering scares, but that's fine. Classic F.E.A.R. wasn't very good at doing them either -only Extraction Point was relatively competent at scares- and F.E.A.R. 2 was even worse. More importantly, F.3.A.R. isn't trying to place the player as a helpless and frightened individual: one of the original F.E.A.R.'s core problems was that during combat you were an insanely hypercompetent murder machine and enemies reacted appropriately, and then the rest of the time the game was trying to stick to stock supernatural horror movie sorts of conceits that center heavily around a sense of helplessness. F.3.A.R. instead fully embraces the Point Man's status as a monstrously dangerous superhuman, and in fact the narrative embraces that you've scythed through hundreds of people single-handedly and runs with a plot where the Point Man is a pretty vicious individual. (As opposed to F.E.A.R. vaguely acting like you're a heroic individual)
Part and parcel of this is that F.3.A.R. is properly embracing a singular design for the setting. Classic F.E.A.R. has at its core concept that the F.E.A.R. organization is a body of people who routinely deal with paranormal events and so should have a significant body of knowledge on how to react to such situations and generally not behave as if they're out of their depth. Sometimes the game would actually remember this -there's a good moment where you reunite with your buddies in a room where Alma has psychically murdered people such that there's nothing but weirdly intact skeletons and a lot of blood and your team takes it in stride- but more often than not it tended to behave as if paranormal events were entirely outside everyone's experience because it so desperately wanted to force a creepy/scary atmosphere and this demands a lot of ignorance to make work.
F.E.A.R. 2 was even worse about this problem: in the original F.E.A.R. it was murky exactly how familiar Armacham was with the paranormal science they were delving into. They had a couple of closely-related projects, and it was fairly obvious that Alma's situation was poorly-understood. This went well with everyone involved being fairly ignorant of the mechanics of the supernatural and all, at least to a point. F.E.A.R. 2 instead delves fully into the idea that Armacham has a fairly ridiculous amount of prior research into various paranormal mechanics, such that they can eg identify 'telesthenic potential' in people without those people even knowing they've been getting studied.
F.3.A.R. finally decides that the paranormal is sufficiently openly known to justify a lot of the crazy superscience, and stops trying to act like the Point Man would be readily spooked by stock paranormal fair. Huzzah!
In general, a big part of what F.3.A.R. is doing is embracing the world that F.E.A.R. 1 and 2 presented unthinkingly. Armacham has bizarrely loyal death squads murdering their own people as a cover-up in F.E.A.R. 2? In F.3.A.R. Armacham is treated more like the kind of ideologically-driven paramilitary organization that would be necessary to justify this stuff, where F.E.A.R. 2 still wanted to pretend Armacham was a regular corporation that happened to be dealing in some moderately shady business. By the same token, F.3.A.R. embraces the degree to which Armacham and its employees have to be pretty horrifying in general to reconcile the general shape of the first and second game.
There are some other minor-to-moderate flaws: Video Game Sexism is present in moderate force, with only two female characters both of whom are distorted a bit by the game. Jin returns from F.E.A.R. (In spite of dying in Extraction Point) and is largely relegated to damsel in distress and minor exposition dumper, and on top of that we have the visual absurdity that where Point Man actually looks like someone several weeks after basically-an-apocalypse Jin has a freakishly clean face Because Girls Must Always Be Pretty. Alma is made much more passive an element of the story, and in fact the climax of the game -both narratively and in terms of gameplay- is a fight against (the psychic memory version of) a man. Part and parcel of this is that where Paxton was primarily an extension of Alma's will in F.E.A.R. in F.3.A.R. he's now a character in his own right. (Albeit one who sides with Alma by default)
On the other hand, F.E.A.R. 2 was already knee-deep into dumb sexist nonsense and trying to play up Paxton as a major villain in his own right, and in Jin's case it's worth pointing out that she's at least relevant to F.3.A.R.'s story. Back in F.E.A.R. she wasn't a damsel in distress or anything like that, but she also wasn't in any way important to the story; an argument can be made that F.3.A.R. is an upgrade in Jin's handling just for the fact that she actually matters.
A weird minor complaint is that Point Man's default standing height left me constantly feeling like I had to be crouching. His view is really low to the ground, and it took until nearly the end of the game for me to adjust to it.
I could also complain about some elements of how the world of F.3.A.R. is fairly absurdist, and if I'd gone straight from F.E.A.R. to F.3.A.R. I probably would have, but the fact is that 99% of the craziest things in F.3.A.R. are directly inherited from the second game. The fact that the exceptions tend to be actually good gameplay doesn't hurt.
By a similar token, I'm of more mixed feelings about the fact that F.3.A.R. is largely a modern cover shooter sort of game but with F.E.A.R. elements appearing intermittently, but I can't really find it in me to blame F.3.A.R. for this. F.E.A.R. 2 was already transitioning away from classic F.E.A.R. toward a modern cover shooter sort of game, F.3.A.R. is just completing that transition. F.3.A.R. may not have been made by Monoloth, but even aside my personally low opinion of Monolith's single-player design (I've never played multiplayer in their games, and eg I'm given to understand AvP 2's multiplayer is its big draw for a lot of people, so I can't offer an opinion on Monolith's competency at multiplayer design) I honestly suspect that if Monolith had made the third game it still would've largely completed that transition, just differing in some details.
Returning to the positive though, one thing I really like the handling of is the Creep.
The first time you encounter the Creep, it's just a nameless, unexplained paranormal enemy who gets in your face and screams at you and then goes away. Okay, odd, but not really notable. As you delve deeper into the game, the Creep shows up with increasing frequency, and eventually it becomes an actual danger in spooking sequences, a difficult-to-see fog that follows you and if you let it touch you the Creep lunges out, attacks you (For actual damage!), then bounces away and the fog respawns somewhere randomly nearby. So it's a distinctive, recurring enemy, it still doesn't have a name, and you still don't have an explanation, but it's clearly important for some reason.
Finally, you get to the last mission and the Creep is hounding you incessantly while you go around reliving memories of Point Man and Paxton's awful, awful childhoods, and you're destroying symbols of your awful memories in an attempt to escape the past that is haunting you, all while Harlan Wade's voice is loud and angry and mean every time you hear him.
Then you get into a psychic boss battle against a giant version of the Creep, and every time you hurt it Harlan Wade says something mean and angry. When you finally defeat it, the blank upper portion of its face comes away to reveal Harlan Wade's face underneath.
The Creep was, the whole time, your bad memories of Harlan Wade literally haunting you. It's a fantastic moment.
(Though I'm slightly distorting the presentation of events so I could refer to the Creep by name from the beginning: at the beginning of the final level we get a bit of Paxton alluding to how him and Point Man used to call Harlan Wade 'the creep', but you don't learn that the creature you've been hunted by this whole time is called the Creep until it's time for the boss fight, so the connection isn't drawn until then)
This ties nicely into a broader aspect of F.3.A.R.'s competency: usually in supernatural horror involving ghosts and psychics and whatnot, a sizable aspect of the story is that it's dealing with the intensely personal and awful and the supernatural framework is more a metaphor for things like 'people in positions of power whose lives are shaped by their awful childhood' and 'the decisions of those who came before us continuing to impact our lives long after they are dead'. F.3.A.R. recognizes and embraces this, hence why the final level is about Paxton and Point Man coming to grips with their own past, and also hence why the Creep -a representation of Harlan Wade's awful treatment of Paxton and Point Man- has been haunting you the whole game while Paxton has made a point of eg explicitly blaming his own murderous tendencies on how Harlan Wade chose to shape the two of them. The original F.E.A.R. was sort of vaguely aware this was a thing, and assembled tropes together in a manner that was almost-but-not-quite-right for that, and unsurprisingly the result is fairly erratic in its competency. F.E.A.R. 2 didn't understand this at all, and just ran with 'Alma is psychic' as 'Alma is a supervillain who can do whatever the writers want her to do whenever they want her to do it', resulting in a completely awful story.
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On a more gameplay note, I'm legit impressed with how Paxton was handled as a player piece. You can't play him in a single-player campaign run for your first run-through (Or more precisely you can't play him on a given mission without doing Point Man first on that mission), and that initially annoyed me; this is fairly typical of games, to make the 'normal' option available right away and the actually interesting options locked away behind slogging through the boring option, and I usually resent it. However, with actually playing the game I got to see it's a hugely sensible decision. A major part of Paxton's play is that you need to move fast, and a big part of moving fast is knowing the environment already, which means having played through a mission already. Forcing the player to run through the campaign as Point Man first goes a long way to lay the groundwork for actually enjoying a Paxton run.
More broadly, Paxton plays very differently from Point Man, to an extent that actually shocked me. I was going in expecting one of two scenarios: in the first scenario, you'd play him like Point Man, just with a minor nuisance of having to deal with possession mechanics. In the second scenario, possession would be a gimmick with limited use and Paxton would mostly just be a wizard-y sort whose magical powers still ended up playing depressingly like gunplay, but with fewer options.
In actuality, Paxton ideally spends a lot of time possessing people, but extending a possession demands picking up something that's dropped at the location enemies die at so where Point Man is inclined to sit back and snipe people, Paxton is heavily encouraged to charge into people's faces continuously. This is further amplified by the fact that Paxton doesn't die when a body goes down, popping out of it at full health no matter what (Outside of eg falling down a bottomless pit), allowing him to survive such recklessness quite consistently. The only downside to losing a body is that you need a full default charge to initiate a possession, and you always have none when exiting a body.
That point itself is actually another example of why it's purposeful of the game to force you to play Point Man first: while I'm of mixed feelings of the details of the mechanic itself, F.3.A.R. has your account level up as part and parcel of playing the game well, gaining benefits like an increase to how much ammo you can carry, an increase in your health total, more grenade carrying capacity... and most relevantly to this point, an increase in your meter capacity. (Slow-mo for Point Man, possession bar for Paxton) In the case of Paxton, the first gains are especially significant: when you possess someone, this is considered to have killed them, including that you get the possession-extension resource as a result, which does absolutely nothing if you were already completely full on your meter at the time; with such level-up gains, suddenly Paxton can be just barely at a regular full meter, initiate a possession, and actually benefit from the resource drop.
It's all impressively well-designed and a lot of fun to actually play.
There's some fiddly issues, with bits and pieces of the design making it clear that the levels are tuned first and foremost for Point Man, with some encounters that are moderately challenging for a solo Point Man run being instead a bit of a joke for Paxton (eg the lightest robot enemy can be stunlocked by Fettel Blasts) and other encounters that are relatively easy or moderately challenging being much harder for Paxton. (eg the dog-ape-hellbeasts are generally arranged so Paxton can't fight them in a body, he can't possess them, they take multiple Fettel Blasts to kill, and they're fast and can kill you fairly quickly) It's mostly fairly subtle stuff, though, and furthermore there's actually plenty of accommodation for Paxton, it's just that a lot of it is easy to overlook because it can be fit into other game design purposes. (eg the game tends to avoid singular big threats, basically because Paxton's abilities let him effortlessly deal with any individual threat that's susceptible to his lifting and especially his possession and making an enemy immune to those threats risks making them too difficult for Paxton to fight solo) I was expecting the tuning to be far more uneven, given most games.
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Part of what's kind of amazing about F.3.A.R. is that it's clear the team is reasonably familiar with the prior two games and is quite fond of them. There's some hiccups that suggest Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate are not a part of this (eg Jin being alive without commentary or explanation), and the Rebirth storyline from F.E.A.R. 2, while it seems to provide some inspiration for Paxton's abilities and general aesthetic, is ignored as far its actual 'and Paxton is alive with his own body again' intent... but overall this is a game that, while it could be viewed as disrespecting its predecessors, can't be argued as being ignorant of them, nor as taking a dislike to them.
This is quite surprising given that F.3.A.R. was not made by Monolith, though admittedly Day 1 Studios had worked on porting the original F.E.A.R. to X-Box 360 and Playstation 3 and so actually had some prior familiarity, but still, it's unusual for an external company to pull off this kind of thing in this kind of way.
Though as I'll be talking about when I get to F.E.A.R. itself, it's not particularly unprecedented for Monolith to do worse with their own franchise than other companies...
But yeah, F.3.A.R. isn't perfect, and in particular if one was hoping for something more like the original F.E.A.R. it's probably going to disappoint a bit, but it's a shockingly good game.
Let's start with the negative: F.3.A.R. leans more on generic modern cover shooter design than on classic F.E.A.R. design, and so there's an argument you could go and play some other modern cover shooter for most of the same experience... at least, when playing the Point Man, but I'll come back to that later. Related to this point, F.3.A.R. streamlines the game experience by doing away with almost all resource management: there's no armor, no medkits, your health fully regenerates in a matter of seconds. All that's left is your two weapons and your Slow-Mo meter. This means a lot of depth and nuance from the original game is gone entirely.
Segueing into the positive, this means F.3.A.R. is properly embracing an entire coherent design philosophy. F.E.A.R. 2 was this awful game halfway between classic F.E.A.R and a modern cover shooter sort of experience, with the strengths of neither. F.3.A.R. is fundamentally competent in a way F.E.A.R. 2 was not, because it's building on well-established principles that work.
F.3.A.R. isn't so hot at delivering scares, but that's fine. Classic F.E.A.R. wasn't very good at doing them either -only Extraction Point was relatively competent at scares- and F.E.A.R. 2 was even worse. More importantly, F.3.A.R. isn't trying to place the player as a helpless and frightened individual: one of the original F.E.A.R.'s core problems was that during combat you were an insanely hypercompetent murder machine and enemies reacted appropriately, and then the rest of the time the game was trying to stick to stock supernatural horror movie sorts of conceits that center heavily around a sense of helplessness. F.3.A.R. instead fully embraces the Point Man's status as a monstrously dangerous superhuman, and in fact the narrative embraces that you've scythed through hundreds of people single-handedly and runs with a plot where the Point Man is a pretty vicious individual. (As opposed to F.E.A.R. vaguely acting like you're a heroic individual)
Part and parcel of this is that F.3.A.R. is properly embracing a singular design for the setting. Classic F.E.A.R. has at its core concept that the F.E.A.R. organization is a body of people who routinely deal with paranormal events and so should have a significant body of knowledge on how to react to such situations and generally not behave as if they're out of their depth. Sometimes the game would actually remember this -there's a good moment where you reunite with your buddies in a room where Alma has psychically murdered people such that there's nothing but weirdly intact skeletons and a lot of blood and your team takes it in stride- but more often than not it tended to behave as if paranormal events were entirely outside everyone's experience because it so desperately wanted to force a creepy/scary atmosphere and this demands a lot of ignorance to make work.
F.E.A.R. 2 was even worse about this problem: in the original F.E.A.R. it was murky exactly how familiar Armacham was with the paranormal science they were delving into. They had a couple of closely-related projects, and it was fairly obvious that Alma's situation was poorly-understood. This went well with everyone involved being fairly ignorant of the mechanics of the supernatural and all, at least to a point. F.E.A.R. 2 instead delves fully into the idea that Armacham has a fairly ridiculous amount of prior research into various paranormal mechanics, such that they can eg identify 'telesthenic potential' in people without those people even knowing they've been getting studied.
F.3.A.R. finally decides that the paranormal is sufficiently openly known to justify a lot of the crazy superscience, and stops trying to act like the Point Man would be readily spooked by stock paranormal fair. Huzzah!
In general, a big part of what F.3.A.R. is doing is embracing the world that F.E.A.R. 1 and 2 presented unthinkingly. Armacham has bizarrely loyal death squads murdering their own people as a cover-up in F.E.A.R. 2? In F.3.A.R. Armacham is treated more like the kind of ideologically-driven paramilitary organization that would be necessary to justify this stuff, where F.E.A.R. 2 still wanted to pretend Armacham was a regular corporation that happened to be dealing in some moderately shady business. By the same token, F.3.A.R. embraces the degree to which Armacham and its employees have to be pretty horrifying in general to reconcile the general shape of the first and second game.
There are some other minor-to-moderate flaws: Video Game Sexism is present in moderate force, with only two female characters both of whom are distorted a bit by the game. Jin returns from F.E.A.R. (In spite of dying in Extraction Point) and is largely relegated to damsel in distress and minor exposition dumper, and on top of that we have the visual absurdity that where Point Man actually looks like someone several weeks after basically-an-apocalypse Jin has a freakishly clean face Because Girls Must Always Be Pretty. Alma is made much more passive an element of the story, and in fact the climax of the game -both narratively and in terms of gameplay- is a fight against (the psychic memory version of) a man. Part and parcel of this is that where Paxton was primarily an extension of Alma's will in F.E.A.R. in F.3.A.R. he's now a character in his own right. (Albeit one who sides with Alma by default)
On the other hand, F.E.A.R. 2 was already knee-deep into dumb sexist nonsense and trying to play up Paxton as a major villain in his own right, and in Jin's case it's worth pointing out that she's at least relevant to F.3.A.R.'s story. Back in F.E.A.R. she wasn't a damsel in distress or anything like that, but she also wasn't in any way important to the story; an argument can be made that F.3.A.R. is an upgrade in Jin's handling just for the fact that she actually matters.
A weird minor complaint is that Point Man's default standing height left me constantly feeling like I had to be crouching. His view is really low to the ground, and it took until nearly the end of the game for me to adjust to it.
I could also complain about some elements of how the world of F.3.A.R. is fairly absurdist, and if I'd gone straight from F.E.A.R. to F.3.A.R. I probably would have, but the fact is that 99% of the craziest things in F.3.A.R. are directly inherited from the second game. The fact that the exceptions tend to be actually good gameplay doesn't hurt.
By a similar token, I'm of more mixed feelings about the fact that F.3.A.R. is largely a modern cover shooter sort of game but with F.E.A.R. elements appearing intermittently, but I can't really find it in me to blame F.3.A.R. for this. F.E.A.R. 2 was already transitioning away from classic F.E.A.R. toward a modern cover shooter sort of game, F.3.A.R. is just completing that transition. F.3.A.R. may not have been made by Monoloth, but even aside my personally low opinion of Monolith's single-player design (I've never played multiplayer in their games, and eg I'm given to understand AvP 2's multiplayer is its big draw for a lot of people, so I can't offer an opinion on Monolith's competency at multiplayer design) I honestly suspect that if Monolith had made the third game it still would've largely completed that transition, just differing in some details.
Returning to the positive though, one thing I really like the handling of is the Creep.
The first time you encounter the Creep, it's just a nameless, unexplained paranormal enemy who gets in your face and screams at you and then goes away. Okay, odd, but not really notable. As you delve deeper into the game, the Creep shows up with increasing frequency, and eventually it becomes an actual danger in spooking sequences, a difficult-to-see fog that follows you and if you let it touch you the Creep lunges out, attacks you (For actual damage!), then bounces away and the fog respawns somewhere randomly nearby. So it's a distinctive, recurring enemy, it still doesn't have a name, and you still don't have an explanation, but it's clearly important for some reason.
Finally, you get to the last mission and the Creep is hounding you incessantly while you go around reliving memories of Point Man and Paxton's awful, awful childhoods, and you're destroying symbols of your awful memories in an attempt to escape the past that is haunting you, all while Harlan Wade's voice is loud and angry and mean every time you hear him.
Then you get into a psychic boss battle against a giant version of the Creep, and every time you hurt it Harlan Wade says something mean and angry. When you finally defeat it, the blank upper portion of its face comes away to reveal Harlan Wade's face underneath.
The Creep was, the whole time, your bad memories of Harlan Wade literally haunting you. It's a fantastic moment.
(Though I'm slightly distorting the presentation of events so I could refer to the Creep by name from the beginning: at the beginning of the final level we get a bit of Paxton alluding to how him and Point Man used to call Harlan Wade 'the creep', but you don't learn that the creature you've been hunted by this whole time is called the Creep until it's time for the boss fight, so the connection isn't drawn until then)
This ties nicely into a broader aspect of F.3.A.R.'s competency: usually in supernatural horror involving ghosts and psychics and whatnot, a sizable aspect of the story is that it's dealing with the intensely personal and awful and the supernatural framework is more a metaphor for things like 'people in positions of power whose lives are shaped by their awful childhood' and 'the decisions of those who came before us continuing to impact our lives long after they are dead'. F.3.A.R. recognizes and embraces this, hence why the final level is about Paxton and Point Man coming to grips with their own past, and also hence why the Creep -a representation of Harlan Wade's awful treatment of Paxton and Point Man- has been haunting you the whole game while Paxton has made a point of eg explicitly blaming his own murderous tendencies on how Harlan Wade chose to shape the two of them. The original F.E.A.R. was sort of vaguely aware this was a thing, and assembled tropes together in a manner that was almost-but-not-quite-right for that, and unsurprisingly the result is fairly erratic in its competency. F.E.A.R. 2 didn't understand this at all, and just ran with 'Alma is psychic' as 'Alma is a supervillain who can do whatever the writers want her to do whenever they want her to do it', resulting in a completely awful story.
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On a more gameplay note, I'm legit impressed with how Paxton was handled as a player piece. You can't play him in a single-player campaign run for your first run-through (Or more precisely you can't play him on a given mission without doing Point Man first on that mission), and that initially annoyed me; this is fairly typical of games, to make the 'normal' option available right away and the actually interesting options locked away behind slogging through the boring option, and I usually resent it. However, with actually playing the game I got to see it's a hugely sensible decision. A major part of Paxton's play is that you need to move fast, and a big part of moving fast is knowing the environment already, which means having played through a mission already. Forcing the player to run through the campaign as Point Man first goes a long way to lay the groundwork for actually enjoying a Paxton run.
More broadly, Paxton plays very differently from Point Man, to an extent that actually shocked me. I was going in expecting one of two scenarios: in the first scenario, you'd play him like Point Man, just with a minor nuisance of having to deal with possession mechanics. In the second scenario, possession would be a gimmick with limited use and Paxton would mostly just be a wizard-y sort whose magical powers still ended up playing depressingly like gunplay, but with fewer options.
In actuality, Paxton ideally spends a lot of time possessing people, but extending a possession demands picking up something that's dropped at the location enemies die at so where Point Man is inclined to sit back and snipe people, Paxton is heavily encouraged to charge into people's faces continuously. This is further amplified by the fact that Paxton doesn't die when a body goes down, popping out of it at full health no matter what (Outside of eg falling down a bottomless pit), allowing him to survive such recklessness quite consistently. The only downside to losing a body is that you need a full default charge to initiate a possession, and you always have none when exiting a body.
That point itself is actually another example of why it's purposeful of the game to force you to play Point Man first: while I'm of mixed feelings of the details of the mechanic itself, F.3.A.R. has your account level up as part and parcel of playing the game well, gaining benefits like an increase to how much ammo you can carry, an increase in your health total, more grenade carrying capacity... and most relevantly to this point, an increase in your meter capacity. (Slow-mo for Point Man, possession bar for Paxton) In the case of Paxton, the first gains are especially significant: when you possess someone, this is considered to have killed them, including that you get the possession-extension resource as a result, which does absolutely nothing if you were already completely full on your meter at the time; with such level-up gains, suddenly Paxton can be just barely at a regular full meter, initiate a possession, and actually benefit from the resource drop.
It's all impressively well-designed and a lot of fun to actually play.
There's some fiddly issues, with bits and pieces of the design making it clear that the levels are tuned first and foremost for Point Man, with some encounters that are moderately challenging for a solo Point Man run being instead a bit of a joke for Paxton (eg the lightest robot enemy can be stunlocked by Fettel Blasts) and other encounters that are relatively easy or moderately challenging being much harder for Paxton. (eg the dog-ape-hellbeasts are generally arranged so Paxton can't fight them in a body, he can't possess them, they take multiple Fettel Blasts to kill, and they're fast and can kill you fairly quickly) It's mostly fairly subtle stuff, though, and furthermore there's actually plenty of accommodation for Paxton, it's just that a lot of it is easy to overlook because it can be fit into other game design purposes. (eg the game tends to avoid singular big threats, basically because Paxton's abilities let him effortlessly deal with any individual threat that's susceptible to his lifting and especially his possession and making an enemy immune to those threats risks making them too difficult for Paxton to fight solo) I was expecting the tuning to be far more uneven, given most games.
-------------------------------
Part of what's kind of amazing about F.3.A.R. is that it's clear the team is reasonably familiar with the prior two games and is quite fond of them. There's some hiccups that suggest Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate are not a part of this (eg Jin being alive without commentary or explanation), and the Rebirth storyline from F.E.A.R. 2, while it seems to provide some inspiration for Paxton's abilities and general aesthetic, is ignored as far its actual 'and Paxton is alive with his own body again' intent... but overall this is a game that, while it could be viewed as disrespecting its predecessors, can't be argued as being ignorant of them, nor as taking a dislike to them.
This is quite surprising given that F.3.A.R. was not made by Monolith, though admittedly Day 1 Studios had worked on porting the original F.E.A.R. to X-Box 360 and Playstation 3 and so actually had some prior familiarity, but still, it's unusual for an external company to pull off this kind of thing in this kind of way.
Though as I'll be talking about when I get to F.E.A.R. itself, it's not particularly unprecedented for Monolith to do worse with their own franchise than other companies...
But yeah, F.3.A.R. isn't perfect, and in particular if one was hoping for something more like the original F.E.A.R. it's probably going to disappoint a bit, but it's a shockingly good game.
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