F.E.A.R. 2

I'd originally intended to do a somewhat in-depth post on F.E.A.R. 2, or more precisely of the F.E.A.R. series as I've ended up getting all three games recently and I like talking about series more than individual entries. Context, cross-comparison,s all that stuff is interesting.

Then it turned out I can't complete the game.

There is a rare bug in F.E.A.R. 2 that my digging around has found no solution to: towards the end of the Elementary School level, Alma attacks you and you're supposed to mash melee to drive her off, and pretty much immediately thereafter the mission ends. What actually happens in my case is that pressing the melee attack button does nothing. In fact, where other people have described burning through their medkits and still dying, I can't even use my medkits or do much of anything. I've reloaded the level from the beginning, assigned melee to a non-mouse input, and dug around just in case there's some fix available via eg hacking. Nope. The game just has a completely game-ruining bug that was known about 9 years ago and it has never been fixed.

This is entirely consistent with how terrible the rest of the game is, honestly.

The original F.E.A.R. has good gunplay, with pretty consistently appropriate level of challenge, whatever complaints I might have about other gameplay choices. F.E.A.R. 2 has bizarre, bad gunplay where enemies limp-wristedly shoot little bursts of 3 shots that largely miss, with bizarrely large gaps between volleys, with said shots doing almost no damage when they do hit. The difficultly is so pathetic I only twice used a medkit where it was actually important in the entirety of what I did manage to play. (I used medkits maybe 3 other times purely because I was missing a little bit of health, was approaching a Point Of No Return, and there was an extra lying around) And it's insulting about it too, with one particularly memorable sequence clearly expecting the player to lose their entire health meter several times over because it threw 4 armors at me in as many minutes, not to mention gobs of health pickups, and at no point in this sequence did I take a single hit.

... and then when snipers decide to come at you suddenly you can be dead in two hits. And the game is godawful about accidentally baiting your attention away from snipers; the original sniper encounter was my first death of the run and it occurred entirely because the game drew my attention one way, and then spawned new snipers off an entirely different direction and by the time I figured out what was going on and was moving to get cover between me and the new snipers too late I was dead.

Like sure yeah snipers in real life are dangerous, but other firearms aren't as non-lethal as pillows being slammed into your face. The gap here is ludicrous, and the difficulty curve is horribly uneven and defined pretty much entirely on whether snipers are in the area or not. If yes, the fight is unfair and hard. If no, it's easy and boring.

I'm of the opinion the original F.E.A.R. uses its scares really badly, but on a technological level the stuff it does is honestly very impressive. There's some lame stuff in there -like flashing a simple image on the screen temporarily, relying entirely on it being a picture of a corpse or whatever to make it 'creepy'- but a lot of the effects the original F.E.A.R. uses to try to scare the player are not the kind of thing I'd thought games could do back when the game originally came out. F.E.A.R. 2 by contrast is really, really boring with most of its spooky effects, and in fact bizarrely some of its best effects are on the 'mundane' cloaked ninja soldiers (I did the Reborn campaign: they show up in it) that really have no right to have such amazing/creepy visual effects. And F.E.A.R. 2 is still bad at actually using its scare effects to freak the player out. In fact, it uses them so little F.E.A.R. 2 comes across like the development team really wanted to make a very generic shooter and only reluctantly incorporated F.E.A.R.-style spook effects.

The narrative is vague and dumb. This is a problem with the original F.E.A.R. and I'll be talking about that later, but F.E.A.R. 2 tops the original game here. Where the original game leaves a fair amount of 'why' and 'how' questions unclear, generally you at least understand in broad terms what's happening. I honestly couldn't give you a meaningful summary of F.E.A.R. 2's plot, because it so utterly fails to establish basic information like 'who are you and your buddies' (The internet tells me you're Delta Force members, but the game itself doesn't convey this and absolutely nobody acts like this is true) that while I could throw out some factoids like 'you end up getting slow-mo powers partway through via Science' I couldn't begin to construct an actual narrative out of them.

Worse, what is relatively clear about the story is basically a cavalcade of problems. Alma is suddenly being played as a straight villain, who wants to nom your soul for no reason anyone bothers to explain, as opposed to the original game making it clear she's a victim, albeit a very dangerous victim. The setting has gotten even more ridiculously futuristic than it already was, with scifi bubble shield-bearing mecha, Replicants deployed via drop pod (Since when does F.E.A.R. America have those kinds of orbital assets?), and sundry other baffling bits of future/super science that somehow have utterly failed to influence the civilian world and which the game makes no attempt to justify with the paranormal. The game can't seem to make up its mind about whether the paranormal is a semi-known quantity or not. The list is unending.

The level design and scripting, as I touched on a bit earlier, is just bad. When I went through the original F.E.A.R., I occasionally had the suspicion I'd failed to see what some spooking sequence was trying to scare me with. With F.E.A.R. 2, I'm pretty sure I've missed half of them. Difficulties in combat usually grow out of bad map design and/or bad scripting of enemies, not out of any coherent design arranging an appropriate level of challenge. In spite of F.E.A.R. 2 being considerably more inclined toward straight corridors than the original game, which was quite fond particularly in the late game of having you cross over your own steps, getting confused as to how I progressed next or even outright lost was actually far more common an occurrence.

The Origin campaign probably has tighter design, and it has a few bits I genuinely liked sprinkled here and there, but most of the essential problems show up in it too, and it's actually even worse about the screwy difficulty curve. (And it has a hugely egregious decision to have one fixed turret in the entire campaign which is a trap and if you try to use it you will die to snipers) Its plot is also fairly arbitrary and quite disappointing given the premise of playing a Replicant soldier.

My inability to complete the game was just the icing on the cake: I never really found myself enjoying F.E.A.R. 2 in any capacity at all, or being pleased to understand the purpose of some initially-confusing design decision, or anything of the sort. There's positives, in terms of stripping out some of the more pointless mechanics from the original game -leaning, walking speed, and limited battery life on the flashlight all go the way of the dodo- but they don't make up for all the very serious design and coding problems.

Here's hoping F.3.A.R. is better-considered. Or at least gives me something to talk about, rather than something to complain about.

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