F.E.A.R Perseus Mandate
Continuing my trend of working backwards-ish, let's talk about F.E.A.R.'s second expansion and third campaign.
Perseus Mandate is probably the weakest entry in the series that isn't F.E.A.R. 2, and if it weren't for the literal gamebreaker bug I might rate F.E.A.R. 2 above it anyway. Certainly, the main of Perseus Mandate's appeal is that it's built atop F.E.A.R.'s solid combat, and even then the game rather undermines itself in this regard. Pretty much all of Perseus Mandate's problems can actually be traced to its newly-introduced villain faction:
The Nightcrawlers.
The short version is that the Nightcrawlers are high-tech mercenaries here to get a sample of Alma's genes, so that some bad guy can do something really bad with it in a sequel that will never happen because Monolith declared Perseus Mandate and Extraction Point non-canon and nobody else cares. This manages to lead to narrative problems and game design problems, though this is not to say everything is bad.
Let's start with the VES.
As part of selling the idea that the Nightcrawlers are high-tech mercenaries using expensive high-quality weapons, their default weapon is the VES. The VES is pretty much perfect at selling this idea, as it pretty much replaces the assault rifle, submachine gun, and the sniper rifle (The VES has a sniper scope that's more than adequate in 99% of situations even though the wiki notes that it has less scope range than the actual sniper rifle), and your first encounter with Nightcrawlers is a pretty vicious surprise due to the alarming amount of damage they can output with it.
Unfortunately, Perseus Mandate doesn't have a lot of resources spent into new enemy types and the like, and the game makes a consistent effort to keep its gameplay in line with its plot. You fight Nightcrawlers when the plot wants you to, and you fight Replicants and their powered armor suits when the plot wants you to, and you fight Armacham 'security' when the plot wants you to. The base F.E.A.R. campaign arranges for a fairly solid progression in difficulty in no small part through the use of enemies in powered armor, and the upper tiers of powered armor/mecha use weapons you can't actually loot. This allows the game to up their offensive threat level without automatically upping the player's offensive ability, and indeed the original F.E.A.R. campaign is fairly reluctant to eg pass out Particle Weapons to enemies and when it does it has a habit of placing them in parts of the level you can't actually reach.
Perseus Mandate instead defacto raises the player's standard combat performance -between how common Nightcrawlers are and how much ammo you can cart around in the VES you can rely on the weapon throughout pretty much the entire game- and then has trouble raising difficulty appropriately. The Nightcrawlers do have an upper-tier enemy, but it's a fairly ridiculous ninja-flipping cyborg or something that's defined primarily by having a lot of HP, an obnoxious amount of mobility, and a tendency to be equipped with some of the more upper-tier weapons that the player can then loot off their corpse. For the most part these elite Nightcrawlers are more tedious than actually threatening, with the primary caveat to that being that they don't look that different from a regular Nightcrawler but can tank insane punishment and don't flinch when shot, meaning it's fairly easy to eg pump two shotgun blasts into their face, then realize that oh wait it's one of the cyborg ninjas and he's been shooting you the whole time.
And outside the cyborg ninjas, Nightcrawlers really only have their basic troops. And while the VES largely beats out three whole weapon types, Nightcrawlers don't have super versions of eg the shotgun. So the difficulty curve the Nightcrawlers present is badly uneven, and it's a huge relief when the game actually has you fighting Armacham security and especially Replicant forces purely because it lets the game function better.
The game is more-or-less fun anyway, but the jagged difficulty curve is fairly frustrating and the design decisions have other problems that are more debatable whether they negatively impact the player's experience.
Narratively, the focus on the Nightcrawlers is a problem because... well... Perseus Mandate barely deserves the F.E.A.R. name. The game almost never uses supernatural enemies. Alma and other spooking sequence staples are only rarely in evidence. To an extent this is a relief, in that 90% of your game time is gameplay instead of something like 40% of it like in the original F.E.A.R. but the more appropriate decision would've been to execute those sequences better, as Extraction Point did. And anyway part of the reason it's even happening like this is that the game keeping its gameplay true to its plot while focusing on the Nightcrawlers means that Alma and the general supernatural elements just don't have much reason to be incorporated. It's to the development team's credit that they didn't completely cop out and force such sequences into a plot they don't belong in, but at the same time why even make a F.E.A.R. game whose plot is so tangential to the actual F.E.A.R. plot, setting, and even to an extent gameplay?
A related problem is that the game makes no effort to explain or justify your access to slow-mo. The Point Man has slow-mo because he's Alma's kid and so he's psychic and his particular psychic abilities apparently lead to heightened reflexes or whatever the exact explanation is intended to be. The Nameless Sergeant of Perseus Mandate -who isn't even a F.E.A.R. operative, but rather is a Delta Forces operative- is never suggested to have psychic abilities, nobody ever acknowledges the slow-mo outside of the existing stock enemy responses to slow-mo, but he has slow-mo anyway. This is probably the biggest break between story and gameplay of the game, and while slow-mo is pretty defining of F.E.A.R.'s gameplay it's still pretty jarring. I kept waiting for the game to reveal that Alma had selected Anonymous Sergeant as her agent of retribution or something, but nope.
Another narrative flaw is how the story just sort of ends. The endpoint is sort of logical as an endpoint in the sense that your mission is done, but the actual plot hasn't been resolved or particularly advanced. Indeed, the stinger ending reveals that the Nightcrawlers got the genetic sample out to whoever it is that wanted it, meaning you as a character accomplished absolutely nothing except getting a lot of people killed who admittedly probably largely deserved it.
I did like the fake-out aspect of the ending, though. One of your squadmates dies partway through the game, you load into a helicopter at the end, and when you do both of your squadmates are there. Then the dead one does the disintegrating thing F.E.A.R. does with a lot of its spooky visions. I was legitimately thrown by that in terms of wondering if the game had 'lied' about his death earlier, and once he did fade away I took it as evidence that the player character is metaphorically haunted by the guy's death. It's a moment that lasts like two seconds but it's a really competent moment.
Returning to gameplay for a second, another issue with Perseus Mandate is its use of combat buddies. F.E.A.R. is not designed to properly run with this kind of thing, and Perseus Mandate doesn't incorporate any mechanics to make them a good mechanic. They're invincible bullet sponges that have unlimited ammo and are utterly fearless, the net result being you can literally just hide and let them kill everything for you. Even if you're not going that far into exploiting them, they still tend to distract enemies and kill a few and just generally undermine the difficulty curve further. I suspect the developers figured this out on their own because it doesn't take terribly long for the game to start finding excuses for you to not be operating alongside them.
On a technical note, Perseus Mandate is also buggier than the original F.E.A.R. Not anywhere near as bad as F.E.A.R. 2, but it's not unusual for the game to report a 'disconnect from server' (Even if you've been offline the entire time!) when attempting to transition to a new level and thus force you to load whatever save was last and redo a chunk of the level. This is compounded by the fact that all three F.E.A.R. campaigns provide zero indication of what the end of a level looks like, so even manually quicksaving just before the end of a level has the problem that you probably won't realize you're at the end of a level until it's too late. This is the worst, most annoying bug, but there's also physics issues with ragdolling bodies repeatedly and rapidly making impact noises for no reason -a bug that it shares with Extraction Point and F.E.A.R. 2- and the AI has some difficult-to-articulate problems where they'll get stuck doing nothing sometimes. I also read that there's a bug with one sequence where you control a turret where if you actually kill every enemy with the turret it's impossible to quit out and you'll have to load a save again, but I haven't personally run into that one.
The game isn't without value, but it's an entry you're not losing out on much to skip over, at least from a single-player perspective. If you're interested in multiplayer, that's another matter -among other points, the content added by Extraction Point can only be seen in multiplayer via Perseus Mandate, as Extraction Point has no multiplayer support- but while I don't personally regret playing the game I also don't find it likely I'll go back and run through it again on a higher difficulty or anything.
Perseus Mandate is probably the weakest entry in the series that isn't F.E.A.R. 2, and if it weren't for the literal gamebreaker bug I might rate F.E.A.R. 2 above it anyway. Certainly, the main of Perseus Mandate's appeal is that it's built atop F.E.A.R.'s solid combat, and even then the game rather undermines itself in this regard. Pretty much all of Perseus Mandate's problems can actually be traced to its newly-introduced villain faction:
The Nightcrawlers.
The short version is that the Nightcrawlers are high-tech mercenaries here to get a sample of Alma's genes, so that some bad guy can do something really bad with it in a sequel that will never happen because Monolith declared Perseus Mandate and Extraction Point non-canon and nobody else cares. This manages to lead to narrative problems and game design problems, though this is not to say everything is bad.
Let's start with the VES.
As part of selling the idea that the Nightcrawlers are high-tech mercenaries using expensive high-quality weapons, their default weapon is the VES. The VES is pretty much perfect at selling this idea, as it pretty much replaces the assault rifle, submachine gun, and the sniper rifle (The VES has a sniper scope that's more than adequate in 99% of situations even though the wiki notes that it has less scope range than the actual sniper rifle), and your first encounter with Nightcrawlers is a pretty vicious surprise due to the alarming amount of damage they can output with it.
Unfortunately, Perseus Mandate doesn't have a lot of resources spent into new enemy types and the like, and the game makes a consistent effort to keep its gameplay in line with its plot. You fight Nightcrawlers when the plot wants you to, and you fight Replicants and their powered armor suits when the plot wants you to, and you fight Armacham 'security' when the plot wants you to. The base F.E.A.R. campaign arranges for a fairly solid progression in difficulty in no small part through the use of enemies in powered armor, and the upper tiers of powered armor/mecha use weapons you can't actually loot. This allows the game to up their offensive threat level without automatically upping the player's offensive ability, and indeed the original F.E.A.R. campaign is fairly reluctant to eg pass out Particle Weapons to enemies and when it does it has a habit of placing them in parts of the level you can't actually reach.
Perseus Mandate instead defacto raises the player's standard combat performance -between how common Nightcrawlers are and how much ammo you can cart around in the VES you can rely on the weapon throughout pretty much the entire game- and then has trouble raising difficulty appropriately. The Nightcrawlers do have an upper-tier enemy, but it's a fairly ridiculous ninja-flipping cyborg or something that's defined primarily by having a lot of HP, an obnoxious amount of mobility, and a tendency to be equipped with some of the more upper-tier weapons that the player can then loot off their corpse. For the most part these elite Nightcrawlers are more tedious than actually threatening, with the primary caveat to that being that they don't look that different from a regular Nightcrawler but can tank insane punishment and don't flinch when shot, meaning it's fairly easy to eg pump two shotgun blasts into their face, then realize that oh wait it's one of the cyborg ninjas and he's been shooting you the whole time.
And outside the cyborg ninjas, Nightcrawlers really only have their basic troops. And while the VES largely beats out three whole weapon types, Nightcrawlers don't have super versions of eg the shotgun. So the difficulty curve the Nightcrawlers present is badly uneven, and it's a huge relief when the game actually has you fighting Armacham security and especially Replicant forces purely because it lets the game function better.
The game is more-or-less fun anyway, but the jagged difficulty curve is fairly frustrating and the design decisions have other problems that are more debatable whether they negatively impact the player's experience.
Narratively, the focus on the Nightcrawlers is a problem because... well... Perseus Mandate barely deserves the F.E.A.R. name. The game almost never uses supernatural enemies. Alma and other spooking sequence staples are only rarely in evidence. To an extent this is a relief, in that 90% of your game time is gameplay instead of something like 40% of it like in the original F.E.A.R. but the more appropriate decision would've been to execute those sequences better, as Extraction Point did. And anyway part of the reason it's even happening like this is that the game keeping its gameplay true to its plot while focusing on the Nightcrawlers means that Alma and the general supernatural elements just don't have much reason to be incorporated. It's to the development team's credit that they didn't completely cop out and force such sequences into a plot they don't belong in, but at the same time why even make a F.E.A.R. game whose plot is so tangential to the actual F.E.A.R. plot, setting, and even to an extent gameplay?
A related problem is that the game makes no effort to explain or justify your access to slow-mo. The Point Man has slow-mo because he's Alma's kid and so he's psychic and his particular psychic abilities apparently lead to heightened reflexes or whatever the exact explanation is intended to be. The Nameless Sergeant of Perseus Mandate -who isn't even a F.E.A.R. operative, but rather is a Delta Forces operative- is never suggested to have psychic abilities, nobody ever acknowledges the slow-mo outside of the existing stock enemy responses to slow-mo, but he has slow-mo anyway. This is probably the biggest break between story and gameplay of the game, and while slow-mo is pretty defining of F.E.A.R.'s gameplay it's still pretty jarring. I kept waiting for the game to reveal that Alma had selected Anonymous Sergeant as her agent of retribution or something, but nope.
Another narrative flaw is how the story just sort of ends. The endpoint is sort of logical as an endpoint in the sense that your mission is done, but the actual plot hasn't been resolved or particularly advanced. Indeed, the stinger ending reveals that the Nightcrawlers got the genetic sample out to whoever it is that wanted it, meaning you as a character accomplished absolutely nothing except getting a lot of people killed who admittedly probably largely deserved it.
I did like the fake-out aspect of the ending, though. One of your squadmates dies partway through the game, you load into a helicopter at the end, and when you do both of your squadmates are there. Then the dead one does the disintegrating thing F.E.A.R. does with a lot of its spooky visions. I was legitimately thrown by that in terms of wondering if the game had 'lied' about his death earlier, and once he did fade away I took it as evidence that the player character is metaphorically haunted by the guy's death. It's a moment that lasts like two seconds but it's a really competent moment.
Returning to gameplay for a second, another issue with Perseus Mandate is its use of combat buddies. F.E.A.R. is not designed to properly run with this kind of thing, and Perseus Mandate doesn't incorporate any mechanics to make them a good mechanic. They're invincible bullet sponges that have unlimited ammo and are utterly fearless, the net result being you can literally just hide and let them kill everything for you. Even if you're not going that far into exploiting them, they still tend to distract enemies and kill a few and just generally undermine the difficulty curve further. I suspect the developers figured this out on their own because it doesn't take terribly long for the game to start finding excuses for you to not be operating alongside them.
On a technical note, Perseus Mandate is also buggier than the original F.E.A.R. Not anywhere near as bad as F.E.A.R. 2, but it's not unusual for the game to report a 'disconnect from server' (Even if you've been offline the entire time!) when attempting to transition to a new level and thus force you to load whatever save was last and redo a chunk of the level. This is compounded by the fact that all three F.E.A.R. campaigns provide zero indication of what the end of a level looks like, so even manually quicksaving just before the end of a level has the problem that you probably won't realize you're at the end of a level until it's too late. This is the worst, most annoying bug, but there's also physics issues with ragdolling bodies repeatedly and rapidly making impact noises for no reason -a bug that it shares with Extraction Point and F.E.A.R. 2- and the AI has some difficult-to-articulate problems where they'll get stuck doing nothing sometimes. I also read that there's a bug with one sequence where you control a turret where if you actually kill every enemy with the turret it's impossible to quit out and you'll have to load a save again, but I haven't personally run into that one.
The game isn't without value, but it's an entry you're not losing out on much to skip over, at least from a single-player perspective. If you're interested in multiplayer, that's another matter -among other points, the content added by Extraction Point can only be seen in multiplayer via Perseus Mandate, as Extraction Point has no multiplayer support- but while I don't personally regret playing the game I also don't find it likely I'll go back and run through it again on a higher difficulty or anything.
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