How FEAR FELL (Free Article)

I have to say, even if the FEAR games had been a series of uninterrupted home runs I doubt it would be one my favourite things or anything. This gory blood soaked First Person Shooter series is nihilistic to its core and it's not my preferred form of escapism to dismember people in gruesome detail the way this franchise prides on letting you.

That said of course, it's hard to deny the quality of the combat in 2005's FEAR. It has the slo-mo button of course that gives you a few seconds of bullet time, but the overall quality really is a holistic thing. The environment wriggles and bulks at the chaos, glass shatters, dust and bits of wall and blood is kicked up into the air; and then it all freezes as you enter bullet-time. Enemy behaviour is still above average even on revisit, as enemies formulate plans and move around the often looping battle environments to get the drop on you. Aim sensitivity is fast, but precise and your character moves fluidly enough to sell the action-movie hero power fantasy without (slo-mo notwithstanding) making it feel like PointMan has Doomguy level physicality.

And then the guns kick like a horse like in few other games.

The entire middle third of the game takes place in a giant office block, and you'd think this would be the game's most repetitive segment, but it's a credit to its combat that this is actually where the game shines the most. Constricted to these confined maze-like halls, with their box-like rectangular shapes, the intense combat becomes more calculated and more fast paced. As every few steps you're confronted with a right angle corner to lean out from, duck behind or jump out of with confidence as office equipment goes flying.

For as much as this free form dynamic combat is laudable, FEAR is actually quite modern in its pacing. By which I mean, combat segments are broken up by narrative driven “walking segments” where you trot about on a leash and look at some imagery unable to shoot or do much of anything.

The imagery in this case is horror themed, as you're stalked and induced with hallucinations by a ghostly psychic girl called Alma, with long dark hair straight out of Japanese folklore and media.

If FEAR has any glaring failure it's that for a horror themed shooter, the core gameplay and the horror are kept fairly separate and don't intermingle much. There is slight crossover, the fact that the shoot outs take place in darkly lit office space with flickering lights does give the combat segments a fresh mood for the FPS genre; but what a thing this game could have been if military warfare had over time transitioned into taking place in full-on horror themed arenas, supernatural entities interfering in fights or temporarily switching out your mundane location for some hellworld.

FEAR is almost comically the stereotype of what you'd expect a Japanese horror inspired American production to look like, a spooky girl jumps out at you for a minute or two and then military guys throw the f*** down for the next hour.

Where the series goes from here is a real study in how to fumble the ball.

First you have the 2 non-canon expansions, Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate which story-wise are just a further march down nihilism lane with hints at future sequel plans that will never happen; but are a few more hours of serviceable FEAR combat, if you just wanted more of that, decent context be damned; with a solid return to office space in Extraction Point being a highlight.

The sequel though, is another story (or not actually, haha). The fact that Monolith Productions developed both FEAR 1 and 2 remains one of gaming's great mysteries. How did the team behind the first game turn out something that dilutes the appeal of the original down so extremely, while bringing nothing new of substance to the table to make up for it?

Combat has been filed down. You move more sluggishly, lack of 'leaning' buttons restricts your positioning, the looping combat stages perfect for flanking from multiple sides have been largely replaced with corridors, enemies act much dumber than before making slo-mo not something you press to capitalise when you have the advantage but something you just hit to make foes, usually already stood around out in the open, stop for even longer. They've replaced the first game's 'zoom' function with iron-sights, so the cinematic style of the first game is gone, and you get another FPS where half the game will have you looking at a giant circle with everything but a dot in the middle obscured.

The game also chooses to retread pretty much the exact same plot beats as the original. You play as a different mute slo-mo soldier, from another special ops squad, who, guided by another overweight tech geek working for the enemy has to make it through the same city as the first game to a secret facility while being stalked by Alma who will, once again, pick off the rest of your team one by one.

Putting aside the question of whether a FEAR game needs to be about Alma when the franchise is named after the paranormal special ops team you're a part of in the first game First Encounter Assault Recon, and so theoretically we could make a game about any number of different supernatural forces; this seems like a creatively lacking continuation of the first game's events.

When Monolith started development of FEAR 2 they didn't actually have access to the FEAR license, so part of me has to wonder if the initial plan was to do a kind of Dark Souls style spiritual successor, where they would basically echo a bunch of motifs and events from the previous title and then go from there with this 'new franchise' under their control.

It doesn't matter either way, because the creative path that was settled on ultimately is irrelevant to how lacklustre the execution of it is.

You really gotta hand it to them, for all the blood and corpses, and flickering lights everywhere, almost every jump scare from Alma manages to be timed perfectly so as to not scare you at all. I wouldn't exactly say FEAR 1 was that scary either, but it's amazing how the pacing and direction of the horror here hasn't improved in the slightest, and may in fact be worse.

The most noteworthy/interesting element of the game's story is that this time Alma wants to 'do' you. The game literally climaxes with a sexed up adult Alma having her way with you, impregnating herself.

Today it feels like if a game ended with a first person r*** sequence people would be talking about it endlessly, but FEAR came out in the 'unhinged' era of gaming from the late 90s to early 2010s where the name of the game was to try and one up the competition in the shock department. So would you believe that back in 2009 the collective reaction to the ending seemed to be “oh... wow, that's crazy... anyway” - and then we all moved on the next day, probably to ponder instead what a better follow up to FEAR would have looked like.

There was an hour long expansion Reborn, which has a stab at improving on things with some more interesting vertical levels, but it's too little, too late, too pricey.

Without FEAR 1 though, I'd assume it's possible to play 2 and get something out of it, not appreciating how tame and undercooked the whole affair is. It's a bog standard FPS of its time with a ghost theme; you may even play and go, “well at least that school level was kind of interesting”.

What followed with the 3rd game would not be getting said level of charity though.

FEAR 2 feels like a guy showing up to a party but dumbing himself down to fit in with a shallow crowd. FEAR 3 is like a different guy saw that guy performatively shmoozing, thought it was sincere and then chose to imitate said performance so he could fit in too; except he doesn't have any of the affectations or mannerisms down, like Michael Scott running around the office spouting “updog”.

This time Monolith got swapped out for Day 1 Studios; more mechanics get lifted from the at the time wildly successful Call of Duty games, such as now we're down from a 3 weapon limit to 2 and the life bar and medkits have been replaced with regenerating health. It comes off as odd to be chasing the COD audience like this by 2011 when by this point even games like Resistance were recognising the futility of it and circling back to having a weapon wheel and health packs.

We now also have a focus on multi-player, the main campaign is set up for co-op, which isn't even the problem necessarily as much as what it brings with it. As you play now, to encourage you to compete with your co-op partner who may or may not be there, bright colourful bonus markers pop on screen to tell you how epic your shots are right now, or how many collectables you've picked up – dragging any atmosphere the game was trying to build into the bin.

The levels are mostly linear corridors here that you plod around with some of the slowest movement yet; the regenerating health is implemented in the most obnoxious way possible, with about one bullet grazing you covering the entire screen in red jam, turning the overall experience into an eyesore. No more do-or-die last stands can take place any more, now that sitting behind any corner will have you back up to full health. You can't even dual-wield pistols any more, what a disaster!

I will say this for FEAR 3, it's the only FEAR game that after 1 tries to be an actual sequel, rather than a retread of events like the FEAR expansions and 2.

PointMan and the villain from the 1st game return and must team up to track down a pregnant Alma on the verge of giving birth. Rather than immediately being back in the 1st game's city (though of course, we do return there pretty quickly), the game begins in a fresh new setting... erm... a bright Brazilian favela??? Again, because COD did it? Not exactly the location I picture for dark lurking horror hiding in the shadows. The only level of note, is the giant 'super mart' level, which gets points for originality but still struggles in execution.

The story also makes some strange choices, like keeping PointMan mute, even though now there are pre-rendered omniscient 3rd person cutscenes. He just stands around awkwardly saying nothing, but FEAR 2's mute protagonist also returns... and he can talk just fine, making it very confusing why some characters are canonically mute and others aren't. Just have PointMan speak! It's not like he's some iconic mute protagonist, he was a guy in a mask from a game with a middling ghost story, there is no demand to uphold the sanctity of this character by keeping him from saying nary a single word that could undermine it.

I'll also say, just personally, that the majority of the enemies in the first game being faceless clones, produced from a tube a day earlier went a way into softening the brutality of what you have to do to them to survive. As the series has gone on though, the amount of regular people you are annihilating increases, to the point that in 3 the enemies actively want to not fight you at times; making your actions feel more and more grotesque and callous in a way that for me runs counter to combat that is trying to make you feel cool. This isn't like The Last of Us, where combat is scrappy and desperate and the enemies feel that same pressure, In FEAR you're controlling time and doing gun-fu as literal skin flies off your enemies, but I suppose it's on me to be so many games deep into this series of all things and start complaining now about edginess.

The whole thing wraps up with the game trying to present us with the tragic trauma of our protagonist's past, represented by the usual big enemy ghoulies you might expect, but how seriously can I take such an analysis in a game that isn't even brave enough to let it's main character speak? Instead just kill for 6 hours?

The FEAR 2 protagonist also gets portrayed in such a negative way here that it comes off like meta-commentary on that game's underwhelming reception, but the biggest issue with FEAR 2 certainly wasn't that they swapped out one mute guy for another; and also, you really can't afford to be dunking on other games when you're FEAR 3 – the plain cheese cracker of shooters.

Even if you got something out of the later games, it's hard to deny the decline. The compelling dark stylish survival of that office block in FEAR 1 feels like a distant memory when mindlessly hopping across the Brazilian rooftops.

What caused this 2005 FPS that some at the time even went as far to describe as “tactical” to turn into a series of bland trend chasing shoot em ups?

Well that brings us to the real uncomfortable question we perhaps have to ask ourselves. Was Monolith's intention ever to make a hardcore tactical action FPS game of the kind the original FEAR ended up being or did that happen by accident?

After all in the mid 2000s, successes like Halo aside, the home console still wasn't considered the pre-eminent home of the first person shooter. At the time it might have just made more sense to put your FPS on PC, and that being the target platform meant that cutting edge visuals, sharp fast keyboard and mouse action and features like 'leaning' were incidental inclusion that got bundled in, and only by chance came together to define FEAR 1 to it fans. Then when the big money in FPS gaming did become the console shooters with the XBOX 360 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in the late 2000s, the same approach was applied: to do the expected for the target machine; and it was time for iron sights, and shooting gallery enemies in brightly lit colourful gummy bear levels.

The true FEAR 2: fast paced, covered in shadow, cutting well ahead of what console tech could do, with a dizzying array of weapons and tools mapped to keyboard shortcuts, was perhaps a little too inconvenient.