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Preview

F.E.A.R.

Format PlayStation 3

Developer Unknown

Publisher Vivendi

Genre First Person Shooter, Survival Horror

27-Nov-2006 Slow-mo gun porn targets PS3 as the horror-shooter gets ready to scare once more

1 Comments

Stuck-up horror movie fans are idiots. They reckon it's the things you 'can't' see that scare you more than the things you 'can'. Which is total bollocks. Clearly they've never played F.E.A.R., otherwise they'd know the scariest thing known to man - beyond waking up hungover next to Sonia from EastEnders with the taste of stale sardines in your mouth - is a four foot, ten-yearold girl in a red dress.

Yes, that's right: we're scared of a little girl. A little girl who, although supposedly dead, enjoys nothing more than whispering creepy nothings in your ear while you poke about in dark, obviously empty rooms. Or suddenly appearing right in front of you, only to disappear just as quickly as you empty an entire magazine clip of ammo (and the contents of your bowels) in fright. Then there's the way the creepy bitch can be heard skittering off from piles of steaming, blood spattered bones, or seen physically leaning out from security camera monitors. Shit ourselves? We tore a hole through the toilet wall.

Still, such trials are all in a day's work for a member of the First Encounter Assault Recon team (hence F.E.A.R., see?), a shadowy Government Special Forces team that specialises in combating supernatural threats. Think Mulder and Scully with bigger balls, bigger guns and an almost unhealthy obsession with killing things, and you're halfway to visualising what F.E.A.R. is all about. And the other half? Well, we're still having nightmares.

GHOSTBUSTERS
Things start out fairly mundanely in F.E.A.R. You play point man and the newest recruit of the F.E.A.R. team and as such have the dubious pleasure of being first on the scene when a crackpot psychic known as Paxton Fettel and his army of telepathically controlled clone soldiers go on a throat-slitting rampage at the high-tech weapons development facility that spawned them. Like we say, mundane.

Naturally, when you get there all hell breaks loose, what with rampant armies of clone soldiers wandering about shooting anything that moves. But the moment things die down literally, in many cases) and you step into a dark room or empty corridor, F.E.A.R.'s freakometer goes off the scale. As if fighting for your life as one man against an army wasn't nerve-wracking enough, now you have to put up with disembodied whispering, ghosts that flit by the corner of your visions and some of the most disturbing hallucinatory experiences we've had since eating our dealer mate Dave's stash 'for a laugh'.

Why is this all happening? And just who is the little girl in the dress, responsible for continually relieving your colon of its contents? Frankly, it'll take you the whole game to discover the truth, but who cares when one second you're creeping through an open-plan office, bullets pinging off every surface, and the next you'll be pushing through the treacle-thick atmosphere of a hallucinatory stroll along a hospital corridor full of blood.

F.E.A.R. FACTOR
What makes F.E.A.R. so exciting, beyond the fact that each dark turn of the corridor hides a potential brush with the shittedpants demons, is the way the game has been structured to make every firefight a thing of almost choreographed beauty.

For a start, F.E.A.R.'s bad guys are super-intelligent. Forget the gormless first-person shooter cannon fodder of the past: nobody is going to run straight at your gun muzzle, arms flapping about like a drag queen in a tumble dryer here - not unless they're wearing three feet of bullet-resistant, robotically enhanced armour first (and some of them do). Instead, bad guys will look for cover, pushing over tables to make some if needed, before working co-operatively to outflank you or flush you out with grenades. It's so realistic it's almost unnerving. If the continual, blood-soaked hallucinations don't wear you down, then listening to gangs of clone soldiers, shouting to each other in a co-ordinated hunt while you desperately hide in the shadows, will.

The level design is equally inspired. Not so much in a locations sense - the areas you'll travel through rarely get more exotic than half-built offices, disused factories and abandoned apartment blocks - but the openplan map design throws up all sorts of interesting strategies. Higher vantage points and areas with plenty of cover are tactical goldmines: if you don't rush to exploit them first, the enemy certainly will. Likewise, you need to think about your angle of attack; go in from the front, and you'll end up with your lungs leaking out of your bullet-riddled sides, but take a back route of cleverly concealed service ducts and you can creep right up behind them. Of course, Johnnyclone- soldier knows these routes too, and it's not uncommon to find your brains erupting from your eye sockets as one smartaleck bad guy sneaks round the back and blasts you from behind.

SLOW AND PAINFUL
To help balance things slightly in your favour, you possess one major talent that helps elevate F.E.A.R. head and shoulders above its shooter contemporaries. No, not giant boobs (although that would be interesting, especially as you can always look down and 'see yourself'). Courtesy of a plot device we can't reveal for fear of a law suit, your character can, for short bursts at a time, exhibit superhuman reflexes. Not by speeding everything you do up; F.E.A.R. instead slows the world around you right down to a crawl while you continue to move around at normal speed.

OK, so yes it's bullet time, but this is first-person bullet time and, as such, is about a million times more impressive. Having clone soldiers slow to a crawl, shouting, "Noooooooo!" in really deep, slurred voices is funny enough, but seeing the air physically ripple as every one of your bullets flies towards your target is hugely satisfying. You'll feel like a virtual God as you outrun the explosive bubble of a detonating grenade, and nothing beats seeing a man torn limb from limb by a rocket blast in slow-mo. Sick, beautiful fun. Then there are the weapons, which start off manly and just get meatier as things progress. What's really nice about these, apart from the devastating feeling of power and recoil they all have - even the pistols - is that every weapon is so different. Machine guns, rocket launchers, proximity mines and a fleshstripping particle beam are just some of the delights on offer, but our favourite is the Penetrator that fires out foot-long spikes of steel with deadly accuracy and enough force to nail a man to the wall. Catch somebody square in the face with one of these and they'll feel it.

SEEING SPOOKS
Naturally it all looks fantastic, but it's the special effects that really impress the peepers rather than environments or the characters themselves. Shooter Black set a benchmark last Christmas when it came to filling PS2 screens with flying bullet casings and exploding scenery chunks, but F.E.A.R. rewrites the book on PlayStation 3. Take offence at anything in F.E.A.R., from as mundane a target as a pile of office ledger books to an entire squadron of clone soldiers, and you can literally shred it into hundreds of tiny little fragments under a hail of machine-gun fire, each individual bullet producing its own tiny shower of sparks and floating bits of debris.

It's so impressive, it's worth taking time out to just shoot the shit out of the environments, especially when you get to go mental in a science lab. There's plenty to be said for watching containers of explosive chemicals send out gouts of concussive flame, blowing doors off cabinets and turning laptops into melted piles of computer chips. Then again, it's not quite up there with watching someone crumple as you shoot a foot-long steel spike through his leg, then desperately try to hobble away as you roll a grenade between his ankles.

FEARLESS STUFF
F.E.A.R. is clearly a double-hard first-person shooter, and as such online multiplayer is a massive part of the deal. Familiar game modes such as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Last Man Standing are all included for up to 16 people at a time, as well as Control, a mode that involves maintaining control of key areas on each map. Most of your time, however, will be spent on the SlowMo games as these are the ones that feature the heightened reflex ability.

Annoyingly, these bursts of speed don't come as naturally as they do in the single-player game (you must be holding a powerup, of which there's only one per map), but seeing your mates slow to a crawl while you pick them off with a flying kick to the head is very sweet indeed.

Better news still is the fact that, thanks to Sony's policy of not allowing companies to simply release existing PC and Xbox 360 games onto PlayStation 3 unchanged, the PS3 version of F.E.A.R. will be loaded with exclusive new features. The single-player game will be swelled with several hours' worth of new levels, cut-scenes and proper scary bits. There'll also be exclusive new multiplayer maps and an as yet unrevealed weapon (which will be way better than the Xbox 360's lame 'twin pistols' exclusive, guaranteed).

We're breathlessly excited at the prospect of playing yet another first-class shooter on PS3 (and somewhat queasy in the bottom department as we battle through one of the scariest games ever made). Best start stockpiling Calvin Kleins now.

PSW Staff