Aren't scary games fantastic? Doom 3, Silent Hill, The Suffering, Resident Evil... I, for one, can't get enough of them. What can be more fun than sitting in a dark room staring at a game screen, wandering around some eerie setting, getting more and more certain that the coast is clear before… Aaaargh, what the… something gives you the fright of your life, and a need for clean underwear.
F.E.A.R. is another scary first person shooter that fits into this genre. And it does it extremely well. The story is that you are the newest member of the First Encounter Assault Recon team. This team deals with paranormal occurrences and they have been sent in to deal with some strange activities involving some freaky guy and his army of cloned soldiers. However, on this occasion they haven't done very well.
The opening few scenes set the mood with some of the team members getting turned into messy blobs on the floor with just the skeletons remaining intact. This leaves you to sort things out alone. The gore level doesn't ease off either. You will come across dead bodies, puddles of blood and innards, and even victims… or parts of victims, lying on twitching on the floor.
Then you get involved in shooting things. Amazing AI mean that the enemy soldiers are clever, listening out for noises, acting upon seeing you or your flashlight beam, and then moving to find the best cover or flanking positions to get to you. They rarely just stand there waiting to be shot. The gun fights are some of the best I have seen in any game. You really need to think before charging in.
Fast action and gore alone do not make a scary game though. This game is creepy as well. You may be sneaking around watching out for soldiers when something moves in the corner of the view. You turn around ready to shoot, but there's nothing there. Next time it might be a person walking past a door, only to have disappeared when you go through, or a spooky voice causing you to turn franticly about looking for who it came from. They don't happen too often though, meaning that they continue to startle you instead of becoming monotonous.
There are a couple of problems though. Firstly, you are fighting an army of clones. This means that most of the enemies look the same as each other. A few different bad guys would have been nice. Secondly, even with a fairly fast PC I still ended up turning almost all the graphics options down to minimum to get the game to run smoothly. It still looked good but slower PC's will struggle.
FEAR is brilliant. It's tense, exciting and scary all at once. Just remember to keep telling yourself though, "it's not real, it's only a game".
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