F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (PC)
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What is most astonishing about F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin is not that it’s the poster-child of modern cinematic horror: that Gothic-looking nine-year-old girl should be familiar to anyone who has seen one of Hollywood’s reinterpretations of certain Japanese horror flicks.
Nor is it astonishing that F.E.A.R. 2 fails, like so many recent sequels, to convey any narrative points of significance. Or that the prominently-advertised mech segments feel absurdly out of place.
No, what is truly astonishing about the game is how little of what made the original such an engaging and refreshing first-person shooter is present whatsoever in F.E.A.R. 2.
One of the commonly-echoed complaints about the original F.E.A.R. was the “bland” or “repetitive” level design that filled the game’s superb single-player campaign. As deeply as the game’s narrative delved into the supernatural, the gameplay largely remained grounded in a commonly-understood version of reality. As such, most of the game took place in abandoned or decrepit structures, like office buildings, warehouses, garages, corporate atriums, which were all highly-representative of everyone’s commonly-understood idea of an office, a warehouse, a garage, and so on.
What actually made these areas interesting was not their surface appeal, but how they were put to use when enemies came flooding though doors, windows, and ceilings. Suddenly, cubicles became cover. Glass shattered from every window, sparks flew from broken computers and screens, and the walls became littered with bullet holes. That which was just an everyday office had within seconds become an arena of chaos.
Developer Monolith’s solution to this lack of variety was to make nearly each and every level of F.E.A.R. 2 into the kind that gamers everywhere have come to expect from the genre. Case in point: Project Origin contains a hospital that is conducting secret experiments and is only accessible by a giant ominous underground passageway. It also has an elementary school level (which is used primarily for attempted scares, rather than combat) where the nurse’s office is…an elevator that descends into a secret lab. Basically, F.E.A.R. 2 attempts to moonlight as a much darker version of the vastly superior No One Lives Forever 2 and the intense, horror atmosphere that the game desperately wants to create is damaged as a result of the player working his way through levels that could have come from Evil Genius.
F.E.A.R. 2 managed to adopt a nasty trait that its predecessor avoided almost entirely, something I like to call “Call of Duty-ism.” Instead of organically allowing the AI to decide its proper course of action once the player makes his first move, F.E.A.R. 2 instead hurls the player headfirst into battle, essentially assuming the responsibility of first strike. Instead of allowing a player to stealthily enter into an area that is already populated with enemies and observe their movements before attacking, F.E.A.R. 2 assumes that the player can succeed in combat solely with the slow-motion mechanic. The result is a completely lack of a planning phase: it’s just the reaction and the attack. For obvious reasons, the cover system that F.E.A.R. 2 clumsily offers the player goes almost entirely unused.
Monolith also tries to awkwardly intersperse active horror segments into F.E.A.R. 2 without expanding on their playbook of scares and in some cases appears to put even less effort into getting inside the player’s head than it did previously. The first F.E.A.R. did an admirable job of providing some cheap yet authentic scares, thanks to some intelligent placement of its token creepy girl. There was one notable moment, which was partially ruined by the game’s demo, where the player catches a glimpse of Alma while descending a ladder. She doesn’t growl at the camera or attack the player or anything of that nature. No, her mere presence is enough to cause the player to jump from his chair in surprise. Moments like this in F.E.A.R. 2 are sadly few and far between.
In F.E.A.R. 2, Monolith exploits fairly large chunks of any given level as atmospheric set pieces. There are segments of the level where no traditional combat with enemy soldiers occurs. Instead, the game will throw all sorts of postprocessor effects at the player which represent the player-character’s psychological battle with Alma. These effects are both frequent and distracting and what seems clever at first quickly becomes a trite abuse of technology.
Indeed, the creepy atmospheric segments are rarely integrated seamless: essentially, once a player sees Alma then a “horror” segment is underway. She will appear a few paces in front of the player and slowly walk in plain-view around a corner. The player, having no real choice, will have to follow, since it’s his only method of progression. Then, either the music will spike and nothing will happen or Alma will appear at the end of this new hallway. Or, for some absurd reason, Alma will sometimes run at the player, triggering a quick-time event during which he’ll need to rapidly mash his melee button repeatedly. The stark contrast that exists between these segments and the combat-heavy meat of the game renders the atmospheric or horror mood the game hopes to illicit largely null.
There are also sequences during these atmospheric segments when the player is required to shoot ghosts. The shooting of ghosts is, as one might imagine, a thoroughly awkward affair, during which the player is forced to put a bullet into a barely-visible specter. The primary issue with having these ghosts as enemies is that there are certain areas, typically near some sort of major atrocity like a a plane crash, where there are “good ghosts” that represent the souls of the recently-departed. These ghosts never attack the player and do not need to be shot. Their coexistence with their angry brethren is an awful design choice that serves to simply confuse and undermine the latter’s existence even further.
Monolith made extensive changes to the core combat mechanics of F.E.A.R. 2 that were more than likely a result of concerns that the original game’s combat didn’t fare well when ported to consoles. Admittedly, the combat in the original game was very PC-focused. The game almost centered around the tactical and tactile benefits of a properly-placed head shot.
F.E.A.R. 2 went a different route with its combat that made its arsenal into a more joystick-friendly affair. Every weapon has a fairly large kill box (area of bullet spread) that allows for more forgiving firing. It’s an understandable design change that makes absolute sense for the primary platforms that F.E.A.R. 2 was designed for. I played it on PC but it was always Monolith’s intention to craft the game for a console experience. What Monolith also did is to make head shots less valuable, make every firearm less powerful in general, and to seemingly reduce the weapon variety. With the exception of the sniper rifle, none of the game’s special weapons, like missile launchers or plasma cannons, actually offer a rewarding experience and they’re almost all only offered just prior to a specific combat scenario that requires them.
Trying to be a stereotypical first-person shooter is what F.E.A.R. 2 does best. It has vehicle segments where there is a convenient mech lying around that the player can clumsily navigate around a landscape, wrecking havoc with each step. It has a segment where a teammate is pinned down by snipers and the player needs to get a sniper rifle and take out those pesky snipers indicated by laser sights. It has turret segments, during one of which hard rock music plays along with colorful commentary from a nearby teammate. Why?
Monolith’s original F.E.A.R. is a game that is widely recognized as one of the finest action-focused first-person shooters made in recent years. Yet, F.E.A.R. 2 is a game that almost seems to be ashamed of its predecessor and make penance for the wrongs that it committed by distancing itself as much as possible from it. It wants to be Ringu, Call of Duty, and the archetypal action-shooter all at once. But it does all these things without realizing all of what made its namesake such a popular name among gamers and the cohesion that was necessary to create such a game in the first place. At its best, F.E.A.R. 2 is a disappointment to fans of the original game, but at its worst it’s nothing more than a poorly-assembled, though fantastically well-produced, amalgamation of bullet points from any major first-person shooter in the last few years.
Primotech Rating: 
(Please Note- The score attached to this review was assigned by Primotech Editor-in-Chief Alexandre Petraglia)