F.E.A.R. 2 Revisited
Since I couldn't actually complete the game due to a gamebreaking bug, I ended up checking out the rest via a Let's Play. Turns out my already-low opinion of the game just got worse as a result: we've got a sprawling secret facility hidden underneath an elementary school, with absolutely no indication of say government support to even try to justify Armacham having such a facility, the nauseatingly stupid twist that Alma hasn't been trying to 'consume' Becket but instead rape him to somehow generate a baby even though she's dead, and a complete mishandling of the supernatural at the end whereby the final fight of the game is pretty much regular combat except your enemies all die in one hit but spawn from nowhere. Because that's how you convey a psychic battle of wills, apparently.
There's so many things wrong with the ending I could probably write three 10,000 word posts and still have barely scratched the surface of how awful and nonsensical it is, and when it gets down to it I don't want to because F.E.A.R. 2 is broken all the way down to its foundations. This isn't a game where there's good ideas held back by a lackluster execution, or even an excellent execution held back by being built atop bad ideas. The core ideas behind the game are layers of awful, and then the execution manages to lack everything that worked back in the original F.E.A.R. to boot. Big enemies don't feel threatening, and in fact are mostly irritating time and ammo sinks that are fairly trivial to actually kill. The slow-mo mechanic doesn't feel satisfying to use -with, admittedly, the single exception that it's fairly fun to use the sniper rifle with it. The particle weapon's clear successor is super-rare in the campaign and bizarrely garbage-y anyway, firing a painfully slow-moving projectile. Enemy AI just isn't threatening in the way the original F.E.A.R. AI is, with no concept of flanking the player or the like in evidence. The spooking sequences being rarer and less time-consuming is something of a relief, but it's tempered by the fact that they're still a time-waster mechanic and now they're really incompetent at inducing fear/horror/whatever.
The original F.E.A.R. has problems from only half-understanding what drives supernatural horror stories and what kinds of stories they tell and so on. F.E.A.R. 2 is ostensibly set in the same world, and vaguely tries to achieve the same feelings, but is fundamentally written as a really dumb Action Movie that happens to have a twist ending where the Heroic Lantern-Jawed Male Lead gets raped. It doesn't understand horror, it doesn't understand worldbuilding, it doesn't understand storytelling, and it's not even staying true to the things the original F.E.A.R. got more-or-less right.
Thankfully, as I'll be getting to soon, F.3.A.R. is a vast improvement that actually provides stuff worth talking about.
There's so many things wrong with the ending I could probably write three 10,000 word posts and still have barely scratched the surface of how awful and nonsensical it is, and when it gets down to it I don't want to because F.E.A.R. 2 is broken all the way down to its foundations. This isn't a game where there's good ideas held back by a lackluster execution, or even an excellent execution held back by being built atop bad ideas. The core ideas behind the game are layers of awful, and then the execution manages to lack everything that worked back in the original F.E.A.R. to boot. Big enemies don't feel threatening, and in fact are mostly irritating time and ammo sinks that are fairly trivial to actually kill. The slow-mo mechanic doesn't feel satisfying to use -with, admittedly, the single exception that it's fairly fun to use the sniper rifle with it. The particle weapon's clear successor is super-rare in the campaign and bizarrely garbage-y anyway, firing a painfully slow-moving projectile. Enemy AI just isn't threatening in the way the original F.E.A.R. AI is, with no concept of flanking the player or the like in evidence. The spooking sequences being rarer and less time-consuming is something of a relief, but it's tempered by the fact that they're still a time-waster mechanic and now they're really incompetent at inducing fear/horror/whatever.
The original F.E.A.R. has problems from only half-understanding what drives supernatural horror stories and what kinds of stories they tell and so on. F.E.A.R. 2 is ostensibly set in the same world, and vaguely tries to achieve the same feelings, but is fundamentally written as a really dumb Action Movie that happens to have a twist ending where the Heroic Lantern-Jawed Male Lead gets raped. It doesn't understand horror, it doesn't understand worldbuilding, it doesn't understand storytelling, and it's not even staying true to the things the original F.E.A.R. got more-or-less right.
Thankfully, as I'll be getting to soon, F.3.A.R. is a vast improvement that actually provides stuff worth talking about.
Comments
Post a Comment